


The Shadow of Tony Stark

by Teyke



Series: The Undone Universe [4]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Extremis, Gen, Gore, Grieving, PTSD, Suicide, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-06
Updated: 2012-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-20 10:34:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 94,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/584465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teyke/pseuds/Teyke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony kills himself. Steve struggles to deal with being left behind once again. But he doesn’t have much time to spend grieving, because it quickly becomes apparent that Tony was working on a secret project before his death, one with the potential to change the world – and he wasn’t working alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. New York

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Big Big Bang](http://big-bigbang.livejournal.com/). I have embedded the lovely, wonderful art by [Ibrahil](http://evian-fork.livejournal.com/) within this story, and please do give her much love and kudos for being so awesome at the art masterpost [here](http://evian-fork.livejournal.com/120763.html). Muchas gracias, Ibrahil ♥
> 
> If you would like to see who the minor Marvel comics’ characters are ahead of time, please check [chapter 4](http://archiveofourown.org/works/584465/chapters/1050029), which contains the end notes of this story. Embarrassingly, they were too long to fit in the usual section. Please note that there _are_ mild spoilers within the character list. 
> 
> Chapter 4 is **not** a chapter. It’s just notes. 
> 
> Many, many thanks to my beta, [Cyphomandra](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyphomandra). Honestly, that should be many, many, many, many... I’m going to pull out a summation sign, here:  thanks, because that’s how much her advice is worth.
> 
> Any mistakes, misunderstandings, or deficiencies that remain are, of course, entirely my own fault.
> 
> 02/27/13: Many, many thanks to V for reading this through and pointing out some subtle things to fix. And also a great many typos that were really _not_ subtle. /o\ But seriously, thank you V ♥
> 
> 05/08/16: [Kurukami](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kurukami) put together a wonderful [playlist](http://8tracks.com/kurukami/the-undone-universe-ii-the-shadow-of-tony-stark) for this fic, too! The track order is [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5301446/comments/60959830).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_“Eight o'clock on the dot. Don't you dare be late. Understood?”_

_“You know, I still don't know how to dance.”_

_“I'll show you how. Just be there.”_

_“We'll have the band play something slow. I'd hate to step on your – ”_

_Ice. Pain._ Cold.

Steve blinked awake with a gasp. Around him, the windows subtly undimmed, letting the lights of pre-dawn New York in through the one-way glass. Not quite as good as the holograms in Tony’s workshop for grounding him in the here-and-now, but he’d take it.

“Thanks, JARVIS,” he murmured, sitting up and scrubbing a hand through his hair. JARVIS didn’t reply verbally, but the windows brightened a bit more. Steve took several careful, slow breaths, then threw back the covers and climbed out of the king-sized bed. Most of the time, he was grateful for the luxury that Tony had insisted on, despite Steve’s claims that he’d be fine with something smaller. The enormous bed let him sprawl out however he wanted, without worrying that he was going to fall off the edge, like he had sometimes from the army cots, or, later, SHIELD bunks. But at other, rarer times, he felt like he was drowning in it, unable to escape from its ridiculous lavishness. Leo, his psychiatrist, thought that there was a great deal of symbolism in that; Steve was still undecided.

Having successfully freed himself from the confines of the bed, Steve dressed quickly. After coming back from his month-long road-trip and moving in, it had taken him a few weeks to be willing to change in front of what looked like all of New York– especially since news helicopters occasionally liked to hover in front of the windows. When he’d mentioned it to Tony, however, the other man had flown him up with the Iron Man suit and dangled him in front of the glass until he’d been forced to admit that it was perfectly opaque from the other side. Steve still had JARVIS black out the windows when the helicopters were flying around, though.

He grabbed his running shoes, slipping them on and tying them neatly, and then his phone. A quick glance at the front showed that it was reaching 4:00. He’d have been up in another hour anyway, and an hour’s lost sleep wouldn’t hinder him.

Outside, the air was cold, but Steve set a pace that nearly any other man would have considered a sprint, and quickly worked up a sweat. The rhythm of his feet pounding against pavement eased the tight coil of anxiety in his chest and allowing him to think on the dream without getting lost in it. Why had he had that dream again, tonight? It had been – Steve thought, and was surprised to realize that it had been over two months since he’d had it last. He had nightmares occasionally, but more and more they were focused on his worries in the present: another invasion, or letting his new team down.

Leo would probably tell him not to worry much about the why. Everybody got nostalgic sometimes. Steve ran, and let himself think of Peggy: the red of her lips and the curl of her hair, the fire in her eyes. Her bravery, her cool-headedness in the face of danger. Her accent when she said his name - she’d still said it like that, when he’d last seen her, even if she often lost the thread of conversation.

It ached, but it felt... good, to think back with fondness on what had been.

Two hours later, as the sky was starting to lighten, he pounded his way back along the sidewalk, through the first rush of 6am commuters. A few of Tony’s more dedicated people were already entering Stark Tower, some of them nodding to Steve as he jogged up the steps and through the lobby. He could have taken the side-door, a more discreet way of reaching the elevator that went up to the Avenger’s penthouse suites, but he was trying – if slowly – to get used to the press of people again, as changed as it was by the presence of cell phones and Bluetooth devices. The first few times he’d come back this way in the early morning, he’d been asked for autographs, but by now the early morning workers had gotten used to his presence.

“Is Tony still up?” he asked JARVIS as the elevator ascended. Tony was very much not a morning person, but he _was_ a late-night person. A very, _very_ late-night person. Steve had made a habit of taking breakfast to him in the workshop, if he hadn’t yet gone to bed when Steve got back from his run – which was often. Steve could get by on little sleep, but for Tony it was his default state, especially when he was working – much to Pepper’s... chagrin over the last few months. Steve could no longer recall how many times he’d wandered into Tony’s workshop late at night, fallen asleep on the couch, and woken up the next morning to find Tony still working.

“JARVIS?” Steve asked after a moment, when he got no reply. The elevator reached his floor with a soft ‘ding’, and he stepped out to find the lights exactly as he’d left them. “JARVIS?” he asked again, a bit more cautiously.

He got no reply, so Steve stepped back into the elevator, pressing the button for Tony’s workshop’s floor. A shower could wait; honestly, if Tony was awake at this hour, then he would never notice. The quiet humming of the elevator felt odd, even though JARVIS normally didn’t speak out of the blue – but it was the difference between having a naturally quiet companion, and looking around only to find that they’d disappeared.

The elevator dinged open again, revealing Tony standing in front of his closed workshop door. Through the glass, Steve could see into the workshop beyond – as always, it was a mess of parts, half-completed projects piling up on each other. As far as Steve could tell, Tony’s work ethic alternated between insanely single-minded focus and wildly scattered multi-tasking; and even if Steve was much more up to date these days, Tony’s projects were so far into the future that he’d long ago given up any hope of understanding them.

Steve stepped out onto the tile floor, making his footfalls heavy enough that Tony would hear him coming. He could be a bit odd about people sneaking up on him, early in the morning. Sure enough, Tony whirled around to face him, almost jumping in surprise. Steve found himself smiling fondly. This was the side of Tony Stark that almost no one else got to see: not the polished, witty genius always ready with a quip, or the more bitterly sarcastic man whose public screw-ups Fox liked to re-run on slow news days, but the inventor. The mechanic. Tony was wearing one of his ratty shirts with the hole cut out in the middle, wires snaking under it and connecting the arc reactor in his chest to the bare-frame repulsor gauntlet on his left hand. His right hand was stained with grease, as was his cheek, and, if Steve knew him, his hair – which was standing akimbo on his head. His eyes were glazed over, a clear sign that coffee wasn’t going to cut it for refueling: he’d need some actual sleep. Maybe Steve could distract him with breakfast and get him to go to bed. Amusingly, his jaw had dropped open, as if Steve’s presence outside his workshop was somehow astonishing – or maybe he’d been about to talk to himself. He did that. A lot.

“JARVIS isn’t responding,” Steve said. He glanced at the repulsor gauntlet and frowned. “It wasn’t SHIELD again, was it?” When he’d found out about the true extent of SHIELD’s private cyber-war with Tony, Steve had been horrified about the manner in which JARVIS had been treated – and had let Fury know that in no uncertain terms. Just because JARVIS wasn’t human didn’t mean he wasn’t a person...even if only a dozen people actually knew that.

“JARVIS? No, that was, uh – that was me,” Tony replied after a pause, off-kilter. His eyes raked over Steve, dark and unreadable. 

Steve blinked in surprise. Tony worked closely with JARVIS, but JARVIS had long ago explained that he could take care of any diagnostics himself. “Is he okay?” He let some of his deeper concern show. Why had Tony needed to take JARVIS offline? That sounded serious. 

“What?” Tony asked, sounding bewildered, and then hurriedly said, “No – uh, he’s fine. Just. Uh. Not online. Are _you_ okay?”

“I’m good,” Steve said bemusedly. Tony was often very weird in the mornings – but it was definitely past time to start prodding him to get some sleep. He was going to have to team up with Bruce to drag him out of the workshop after this, too. If Tony was getting erratic enough to do something that put JARVIS out of commission, then the situation required active intervention. “How about I make some breakfast?”

“Sure,” Tony agreed quickly. He gave Steve one last long look, and then turned back to the workshop door, saying quietly, “I just have to – fix things here.”

“Okay,” Steve said, humoring him. He stepped back into the elevator.

The doors closed on the sight of Tony keying in the workshop code, shoulders slumped. “...nutshell...” Steve heard him mumble, and Steve wondered what he’d been doing, although he knew he probably wouldn’t understand even if Tony explained it to him.

When he’d first met him, Steve wouldn’t have pegged Tony as an obsessive workaholic. Pepper, before she’d left permanently for the west coast, had mentioned that Tony was far worse since the invasion, but perhaps that was understandable. Now that she was gone, dragging him out of his workshop had fallen mostly to Steve. Bruce tried occasionally, but Tony could distract him too easily with science.

After a quick shower, Steve went back down to the common kitchen and pulled out a carton of eggs, broke all dozen of them into a large frying pan, and set it on Tony’s futuristic stove to start cooking. Rummaging in the fridge, he found various things to add – mushrooms, bacon, green onions – neatly packaged by the people that JARVIS ordered their food from. Steve would be eating most of it, by far, but he’d leave out a plate for Bruce, whenever he wandered into the kitchen after finishing his morning session of meditation. Steve had joined him once or twice, but on the whole he preferred running as a method of clearing his mind.

Steve hummed an old show-tune as he scrambled the eggs, the familiar routine relaxing him from his worries over Tony and JARVIS. He made breakfast most mornings, when Clint and Natasha were on assignment – otherwise, that was Clint’s thing, and Steve happily conceded the title of chef to him. Clint’s omelets were amazing. Even Tony bothered to have breakfast most mornings, when Clint was around to cook.

He turned off the heat and scraped reasonable-size portions onto plates for Bruce and Tony, covered Bruce’s with another plate, and then upended the skillet and poured the rest of the eggs into a large bowl for himself. Balancing the plate and bowl effortlessly – although he was never unaware of it; he’d been scrawny and graceless for too much of his life to ever take it for granted – he made his way back downstairs.

Tony, at least, was no longer standing outside his workshop door, staring off into space. Steve stepped up to the workshop windows and peered through into the darkness beyond. A few of the overhead lights were still off, but the rest were dim enough that it was easy to pick out Tony’s location from the glow of the reactor. In the far corner of the workshop, blue light poured up onto the ceiling – what was Tony doing on the floor? Had he fallen asleep?

“JARVIS?” Steve asked experimentally, but there was still no reply. Well, maybe Tony had just decided to work on the floor, then. He wouldn’t have fallen asleep without getting JARVIS back first.

He keyed in his code, opening the door. The workshop beyond was eerily still – Tony’s robots should have been moving around; at least one always came to greet him. He glanced around, but it took him a moment to sort out the general debris of the shop from what he was seeing – DUM-E was knocked over, wires fried, completely disabled by what looked like a repulsor blast; U lay blasted to pieces to Steve’s left, near the door but hidden from the windows.

“Tony?”

Steve walked further into the shop, keeping a careful eye on the ground so he didn’t trip. The smell of burning hit his nose at about the same time he found Tony.

Steve stopped.

“Oh, God,” he heard himself say, right before he threw up into his bowl of eggs.

There was only bile to come up. When he was done he set the bowl and plate down carefully, somehow unable to contribute to the general mess of the shop. He took one step closer to – to the body, and felt dizzy, like the world had slid out from underneath him again.

When reality stopped being so fuzzy, he found himself sitting on the floor beside Tony’s crumpled body. He had – he had no idea what to do. Tony was – Tony had – had –

Somehow, his phone was in his hand. He blinked at it, not recalling pulling it from his pocket, but not daring to question it, either. Carefully, he unlocked it and pressed the emergency button for SHIELD, although that felt a bit wrong. There was no emergency. There had _been_ an emergency – _oh, God, he had gone upstairs and_ cooked breakfast – but there wasn’t now.

 _“Captain,”_ Fury’s voice came from the phone, as clear as if they were in the same room. It was, after all, StarkTech.

“Tony’s dead,” Steve said numbly. “He... his head is gone.”

Repulsor burns cauterized. Steve couldn’t stop staring at the stump.

Fury was quiet for a long moment. The phone didn’t pick up on background noise – it was StarkTech, it didn’t transmit background interference unless the user wanted it to do so. In his head, Steve could imagine the picture on the Helicarrier; Fury was undoubtedly waving directions at people. He wondered if he was on speaker. Had he just announced Tony’s death to the entire bridge? He thought that would probably be a bad thing, but he felt too disconnected to figure out why.

“What’s the situation? Are you injured?” Fury asked, with that same calmness he’d had when pitching the Avengers at Steve all those months ago. Then, Steve had resented the implication that he _needed_ calmness to keep him grounded. Now, he just didn’t care.

“No. I’m – ” his throat closed up around the word _fine_. “I was just bringing him breakfast.”

It hadn’t even been twenty minutes since he’d talked to Tony earlier. Since Tony had been alive.

Since Tony had gone back into his lab and killed himself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fury’s presence didn’t register in Steve’s brain until the director sat down on the floor beside him. At any other time, it would have been laughable. Nicholas Fury was not the sort of man who sat on floors.

There were SHIELD personnel examining the body, Steve realized belatedly. He wondered what they were looking for; the cause of death was pretty damn obvious. One of them, a woman, picked up one of Tony’s hands, placing his limp finger onto some type of device, which let out a series of beeps. The medtech looked up at Fury. “It’s him, sir.”

Fury nodded. “Triple-check,” he ordered, levering himself to his feet in a smooth motion. He held out one hand to Steve, and then, when Steve made no move to take it, leaned down to grab his upper arm and haul him to his feet. Somebody else had grabbed his other arm. “On your feet, soldier.”

“Jesus, I can’t believe it,” Bruce mumbled from Steve’s left – he was the guy holding onto Steve’s other arm. He hadn’t let go, but without the support Steve probably would have fallen over again. His body felt weird, weak and shaky, like the first time he’d woken up after the ice.

Fury led them into the elevator; a non-descript SHIELD agent followed them. That, too, reminded Steve of the first few months he’d been out of the ice, before Loki and the Chitauri, when he’d been constantly followed. Constantly watched. They’d thought him a suicide risk back then, when his whole world had been yanked out from underneath him. Funny how he felt so adrift again, when only one thing had changed.

He suddenly felt a flood of empathy for his minders, though. God in heaven, he had talked to Tony _right before_. If he had just _stayed_ – Oh, Lord –

“I don’t understand,” Bruce said, his voice shaking, as the elevator let them out on the communal floor. “This is – so out of character. Tony’s not the type to – why would he do that?”

“We’re hoping you can help us figure that out, Dr. Banner,” Fury replied, still with that same calmness. Steve wandered over to a couch and sat down heavily, staring at his hands helplessly. He felt like there was something he should be doing – but it was too late. Everything he might have done, should have done – it was too late.

“JARVIS is offline, and my agents are reporting that the hardware here and at the major SI plants was gutted.” Fury didn’t say who had done it – he didn’t have to. Steve’s memory, crystal-clear as always, supplied him with the scene again: the smell of burning plastic and metal mingled with the stench of charred flesh. “He had control of all the security: records that we need. But the techs haven’t managed to bring him back online here.”

“I’m not – I’m not really a programmer. If there’s something gone wrong with JARVIS – you need Pepper, not me,” Steve heard Bruce demure. “There’s no question that Tony has copies – copies and copies, sometimes I don’t think he ever deletes anything, but that’s all keyed to Pepper...”

The grimace came through in Fury’s voice. “We... haven’t informed Ms. Potts yet. I was hoping that we’d have some answers for her before I did.”

“She deserves to know,” Steve told his hands. He clenched them into fists – but that was useless. He relaxed them again. There was nothing here he could fight, no speech he could make, nothing he could say. At all.

“She does,” Bruce said, backing him up with barely a pause for thought. “She really does. And if JARVIS is down – she’s probably already trying to get hold of Tony...”

“Be that as it may,” Nick’s voice left it clear he knew that Pepper was already making inquiries, “in the short time during which I can delay informing her, I’d like us to get all the answers that we possibly can.”

“Does it matter?” Steve wondered quietly.

Silence. He could feel them looking at him. Were they assessing? Sympathizing? His brain seemed to be – Tony would have said it was rebooting.

“I find it hard to believe that Stark would take his life of his own volition, Captain,” Fury said finally. “He is a man who has fought very hard to live.”

“Okay,” Steve breathed. _Okay._ He remembered Bucky falling from the train, into the icy grips of the mountain. He’d thought that getting revenge, getting _justice_ against the Red Skull would help – but there hadn’t been any time left. Schmidt had died and then Steve had followed suit, and that he’d woken up seventy years later hadn’t made it better.

He’d just gone upstairs to make breakfast. But how could he, of all people, have thought that there would be time later? There was never time later. There was never a ‘later’.

“Tell me what you find,” Steve said, his mouth automatically adding, “Sir,” although not very respectfully. He still couldn’t summon up enough energy to care. He stood, and strode back to the elevator. If there was a target, an enemy, the Avengers would find it. Until then, he’d have to settle for breaking punching bags instead. Nothing would bring Tony back to life; the best he could do was try to protect the friends he had left.

Before they were gone, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some hours later, he was still at it, although he should have been at SHIELD headquarters over an hour before for hand-to-hand combat practice with the instructors there. The serum could substitute for a lot of things, but formal training pushed him even further. With the serum alone he could take on any of the instructors and win – with it and more advanced training, next time, he might not need Tony’s help against someone like Loki.

Next time, he wouldn’t have Tony’s help. His fists hit the bag again, three times in quick succession, the impacts jolting up his arms.

His SHIELD watcher still stood unobtrusively in the corner. Steve alternated between a fuzzy state of not caring, and wishing that the man would go away. He’d lost everything before, and he hadn’t been suicidal then. He couldn’t be. He owed too much to too many people to contemplate wasting their sacrifices. Erskine’s face swam before his mind, and he hit the bag with a heavy left hook, following it up with two right jabs.

Tony had told him about Afghanistan. Six weeks ago – three and a half months after Steve came back from his road trip; scant time to strike up such a friendship, but of course there were extenuating circumstances. They’d been drinking – Tony drank a lot. At least with Steve, he had someone who could keep him company without losing their own good judgement... not that Tony wasn’t devilishly skilled at stealing that from him anyway. Somehow, they’d gotten on to the topic of the super soldier serum, and Tony had started rambling on about the development of the Vita-Rays – Steve hadn’t known that they were key to waking him up from the ice. Steve had mentioned Erskine, and Tony... Tony had understood. Had told him about another foreign doctor, seventy years later, who had given his life for a would-be American superhero.

“He was another captive,” Tony had explained, his fingers tapping restlessly at the reactor beneath his shirt. Despite how much alcohol he’d consumed, his speech was as clear as ever; Tony only started slurring his words when he was caffeine-deprived. “He saved my life – god knows how many times. Got himself killed the last time. I still don’t know – he was a better man. How am I supposed to live up to someone like that? It’s impossible.”

“You do six impossible things before breakfast,” Steve had pointed out, before looking away. “I thought once – I thought once that I was done. That I’d fulfilled expectations. But it’s not about that. You have to keep on going, doing the right thing – and maybe you fail. But it’s the attempt that matters. And you’re a good man, Tony.”

“I’m a war profiteer.”

“Not anymore.”

“And that’s good enough? Fuck, Steve, I can never live it down. I tallied it up, once – how many lives I’ve ruined, how many I’ve saved. No matter how long I keep doing the Iron Man thing the scales are gonna be covered in blood.”

“You saved New York,” Steve had replied. “How many millions of people live in this city?”

“That wasn’t – that doesn’t count.” It was something Tony would never have said while sober – he’d been quick enough to boast about the feat before. But Tony’s guard had been down that night. “That was just – that doesn’t count.” There’d been grief in his voice, raw and dark and personal.

Steve had stared at him for a long time, and then punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Do you even listen to yourself?”

He hadn’t understood it, then. He hadn’t yet figured out the reason behind the map in Bruce’s lab, the one showing concentric circles of potential nuclear death.

In the present, Steve hit the bag with enough force to have sent it flying, were it not one of the specially reinforced bags that Tony had made up after seeing Steve go through a half-dozen of the regular ones in a single workout. Fury was right; Tony wasn’t the type to take his own life. It took a hell of a lot to make the man give up.

But – it didn’t matter. Even if he could track down an enemy, and gain justice – for this, it didn’t matter. Tony was dead. Tony, the man he’d gotten to know best in this strange new world – who built him a motorcycle and dragged him out for baseball games in-between three-day stints in the lab, who seemed all flash and no substance and threw himself between a nuke and New York City, who turned a fatal heart condition into a superpower, who was willing to watch Saturday morning cartoons on the couch with Steve but only if he had his tablet so that he could actually be working on cheaper prosthetics for amputees – a charity write-off, he’d called it. Steve felt something drip down his cheek, and didn’t bother to pretend it was sweat.

This was – it was useless. Steve unwrapped his hands and tossed the tape on the floor, let it lie where it landed. Cleaning up was pointless; he’d be back down here again in a few hours or less. He took the emergency stairs four at a time, listening to his tail breathe heavily as the smaller man – the more _human_ man – tried to keep up. The door out onto the roof wasn’t locked – it never was – although the wind tried to keep it closed. It was always windy up on top of the Tower. Car horns drifted up from the streets below; New York was never silent.

Steve stood at the rail and looked down. His enhanced eyesight let him pick out the expressions on individual commuters’ faces: boredom, irritation, worry, cheer. The ground was very far away. What had Tony seen, looking into the face of death? Death in battle, by injury... that was something else, something different from the cold contemplation of the jump.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Natasha’s voice cut across the wind, low and even. She’d gotten within ten feet of him before he’d noticed her. His watcher had vanished, probably back into the emergency stairwell, ready to resume his post like a good guard dog as soon as Natasha called him to heel. The thought was uncharitable – but Steve didn’t have any charity left.

“I should have seen something,” Steve replied finally, after the silence between them stretched to breaking point. Even it hurt. Tony _chattered_ , through such awkward silences, on and on and – never again.

“It doesn’t always work like that.”

“I was talking to him minutes before,” Steve replied, at last vocalizing the thought. Oddly, it didn’t make him feel any less distant. “It doesn’t matter whether Fury’s right or not, whether there was something else going on. I should have seen it.”

“You’re not trained for that. No one expected it of you.”

Her voice was as neutral as ever, but something in Steve sat up and took note anyway. Steve let her catch his eyes with hers. “It wasn’t your fault either. You were on a mission.” When had she gotten back, anyway? What was she abandoning by pulling out so fast? Had Fury ordered it because he wanted to keep his team together, or did he really think there was some conspiracy behind Tony’s – death?

She blinked at him. “I know.”

Maybe she didn’t need the reassurance he’d offered. Maybe it was just him wanting to take care of the people under his command – to shoulder their burdens instead of his own. He looked away, back out at the city.

“His psych profile. You wrote it up?”

“Steve...”

“I know,” he said, holding up a hand to forestall further reassurance. “I just... want to see if it matches.” Or how badly it mismatched. If Fury was wrong – if it wasn’t a setup – how could he possibly go on trusting his own judgement?

Natasha settled against the rail with a sigh. “For someone convinced he’s a narcissist he has a lot of self-worth issues, but his signature expression of it was mania, not depression. He’d either invent a solution to his problems or party hard enough to forget them.” She leaned out, joining him in his contemplation of the city, although her normal human eyesight couldn’t show her everything that his showed him. “He didn’t take the invasion well, but working longer hours seemed to be helping him cope.”

“I thought he was just tired.” The Lord knew that _Steve_ felt tired, a bone-deep weariness that had nothing to do with having spent the last few hours doing a heavy workout.

Natasha said nothing, letting the silence settle again, not pressing him. But the silence itself felt like a weight. “I came by to ask him what had happened to JARVIS,” Steve recounted slowly, “and he was just standing outside his workshop.  I asked, and he said it was his doing, but that JARVIS was fine – I should’ve known then. He’s never that dismissive of JARVIS.”

“It was 6am,” Natasha said. “Tony’s always weird at that hour.”

“He asked if _I_ was okay...” Steve trailed off. Had that been a clue that he’d been under some sort of external pressure? Or that he’d already decided, then? Tony thought that stopping a nuke from hitting Manhattan, almost at the cost of his own life, didn’t count as heroism; Steve would not have been surprised to learn that he’d worry about a friend while contemplating his own death, even if his active role in that death was still in doubt. Though the scene he’d stumbled onto in the workshop... was pretty damn convincing.

Over the wind, he heard a tiny voice speaking words he couldn’t quite make out. Natasha tilted her head – it was coming from her earbud. Had she not bothered to remove it after being recalled, or was she on another mission now?

“Pepper’s arrived,” Natasha said quietly. “She brought a backup drive with JARVIS. She wants to see you.”

“Oh,” said Steve. He didn’t move. What the hell was he supposed to say to Pepper? What the hell could he do? When it had mattered, he’d failed Tony – failed him in the worst possible way. If he – he should be the last person on Earth that Pepper Potts would want to see right now, or ever again.

“Steve,” Natasha said. She didn’t reach out to touch him, lay a hand on his arm – she kept her distance. On her tongue his name wasn’t a question or a command, but merely a statement, a reminder of where he was here and now.

“Okay,” he said, and he let go of the railing and went back inside.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pepper was sitting in the living room, on one of the horrid couches that looked terribly uncomfortable and were not at all. There was a large, heavy briefcase sitting in her lap, connected by a thick metal cable to a handcuff around her wrist. It wasn’t an ordinary handcuff; it must have been two inches wide, at least, and Steve suspected it was chock full of Stark technology. Mere steel wouldn’t deter the sort of enemies that Tony Stark tended to attract. It certainly wouldn’t deter SHIELD, which could be the only possible reason that Pepper was still wearing the cuff even in the Tower.

Her name on his lips felt cold, sharp like tiny particles of ice cutting into his gums. “Ma’am,” he said instead, and she jumped slightly, turning to look at him with red-rimmed eyes. Everything else about her was as perfectly put-together as always.

“Steve,” she said. Her eyes flickered to the case and then back up, meeting his squarely; Steve had to fight not to squirm. “I’m not naive enough to think SHIELD wouldn’t lie about this for their own reasons. Or to think that they don’t have the means to produce a – a body that would fool an independent DNA test. But you wouldn’t lie to me.” There was challenge in her voice, in her eyes – challenge and hope and resignation, because long before Tony Stark built himself an iron suit and blasted his way out of Afghanistan, he had never been fated to die of old age.

“I’m sorry,” Steve said. His voice cracked on the last word and he repeated himself, helplessly, “I’m sorry.”

Pepper’s face crumpled. She shrunk into herself, her shoulders hunching as she bowed her face towards the briefcase. She didn’t blink; after a moment, her eyelashes were wet with unshed tears. Steve swallowed hard and looked away.

Footprints came from behind him. Not an agent – not stealthy enough, quiet enough for that – Bruce’s: measured, paced, even now. Always. “Pepper...” said Bruce, crossing the floor to sit down beside her, take one of her hands in his own and squeeze.

She squeezed back, then buried her face in the shoulder of his suit jacket – never mind that it cost upward of four figures. Bought by Tony, like the rest of Bruce’s clothes, of course. It wouldn’t matter; Steve was probably the only one who noticed the tear-stains setting in, the way he noticed almost everything, the serum letting him see so much more. Tony noticed details like that too, but that was all genius, no serum involved – noticing was part of how he figured out how to put everything together.

Steve had always thought he was pretty good at putting things together, too. Never again.

“I’m sorry,” Pepper muttered. Bruce hummed low in his throat, a soothing sound that Steve barely heard, and rubbed her back awkwardly – used to personal grief, but not used to the expression of it in others close to him. Steve felt like a stranger, an alien, just like he had after waking up – a man out of time, in a world that wasn’t his own. He shouldn’t be here, watching this. He turned to leave.

“Wait. Steve,” Pepper said, disengaging herself from Bruce with a sniff. She took a packet of tissues from her purse and shook one out, then blotted her eyes with it; mascara stained the soft white paper, as well as tears. Her nose had gone all blotchy from crying – the curse of redheads. Steve waited. “I need – I need a second access code to open the case. Jim won’t be here for hours.”

The name felt like a punch to the chest – even after so many months after waking from the ice, and knowing that she meant James Rhodes, Tony’s best friend, and not James Barnes, a man who had been dead for seventy years. Rhodey had stayed at the Tower on two occasions, when he’d had leave – most recently, when Pepper and Tony had broken up. Three days after Tony had first gotten completely wasted and cried himself to sleep, Steve had given up trying to coax Tony out of the workshop and called Rhodes, desperate for someone who could make Tony Stark put down the bottle and go to bed.

He wondered how hard Rhodey would punch him when he found out that Steve had let his best friend kill himself. He couldn’t possibly hit him as hard as Steve deserved, in the armour or out.

Steve looked at Bruce. It didn’t make sense that the case would be keyed to _Steve_ – surely Bruce, better with all things science, would be the logical choice. “Not you?”

Pepper was the one to answer – of course, she would be. “Your name is the one on the list,” she said. Her voice wobbled slightly, steadied. “It has been for months.” She stood, hefting the case with visible effort – if it was solid metal throughout, then it must be heavy. Politeness kicked in, from some place inside Steve that he’d thought had frozen through; he crossed over to her with long strides and took the case from her. It left him standing quite near to her – for a moment, he was afraid that she would hug him, too. Part of him wished she would.

“Thank you,” she said instead, leading the way to the elevator.

The lab still smelled like smoke to him when they reached it – smoke, and burning metal, and overcooked meat. Steve fought down the urge to gag, to press his hands over his nose. Agents looked up at their approach and shuffled out of their way, some reluctantly. They all had the look of geeks – salivating to be able to work on Tony’s private tech. Steve felt anger well up in him.

“Ms. Potts,” said Fury, stepping out from where he’d been talking to another tech.

“Director,” Pepper said, meeting Fury’s eyes squarely. Her expression was hard, ice-cold – he’d seen that look before. If push came to shove, Steve sensed that she would not be the one bending. She’d die first. For what cause, Steve didn’t know. Tony was dead – arguing with Fury wouldn’t change that.

“I’m sorry,” Fury said evenly. He made a gesture and the remaining techs reluctantly left, some shooting longing looks over their shoulders as they did so. Steve wanted to spit at them, to shout at them – how dare they look like that, when the only reason they were here at all was – was – he said nothing. There was nothing to say, nothing that mattered.

Pepper didn’t reply. She turned toward the blasted server-box, instead – the techs had stripped off the outer wall and cooling systems, removing the destroyed pieces and leaving the remains. She gestured for Steve to put the case on top of one of the racks, then took a breath and said clearly, “Voice-print authorization, delta-nine-two-seven, apple-whiskey-tango-foxtrot, twenty-eight thirty-four, foxtrot-Stark-four-Pepper.” A green light lit up on the metal cuff; an LED beside it remained blank. Pepper looked up at him. “Captain?”

His throat felt suddenly dry. He cleared it. “Captain Steve Rogers, Stark Tower authorization code thirty-four, forty-four, fifty-four, sixty-four.”

The cuff snapped free of Pepper’s wrist as the suitcase began to transform, the sides flipping inside-out to display access ports, cabling. Pepper grabbed a data cable and a power cord and plugged them both in. “In case you were wondering, Director, this is a one-time authorization code only,” she said as the case finished transforming. “JARVIS: Echo-two-four, genesis.”

They all waited for a moment, but nothing happened except a faint hiccup in the lights. Then JARVIS’s voice sounded from everywhere and nowhere, speaking in a dull, unhurried tone, without any sense of sarcasm, humour, or _life_. _“Connected to Tower facilities. Uploading to armour. Upload failed: missing hardware. Uploading to Tower facilities. Upload failed: missing hardware. Uploading to Malibu facilities. Upload failed: missing hardware. Uploading to Odessa facilities. Upload failed: missing hardware. Uploading to Shēnzhèn_ _facilities. Upload failed: no connection. Uploading to Delhi facilities. Upload failed: no connection. Uploading to Toyko facilities. Upload failed: missing hardware. Uploading to satellite network. Upload complete.”_

Pepper breathed out, hard. “That – explains the calls I’ve been getting,” she said faintly.

“JARVIS,” said Fury, “What the hell happened?”

There was silence for a second. That had to be deliberate – JARVIS’s processing power was, Tony had assured him, “Astronomically far off the charts. Laughably far. Like the rest of the world thinks Mumbai is a long way away while we’re looking at Alpha Centauri -far. Okay, maybe not that far. But we'll get there.”

 _“I am unable to ascertain any logical explanation for this state of affairs,”_ JARVIS said finally. His voice was no longer dull and emotionless: now he was worried. _“The armour is not responding. Where is Mr. Stark?”_

Cold washed over Steve. Around him, everyone else was tensing, in their own ways: Pepper looked horrified; Fury grew grimmer; Natasha and Clint went blanker. Bruce just kept on with his meditation, breathing at a rate that Steve could faintly perceive was unnatural.

Steve looked at Fury. What would he say? The full reach of JARVIS’s intelligence was known to less than a dozen other people on the planet – Tony and Pepper, the rest of the Avengers sans Thor, Fury, and three of the top hackers at SHIELD. Before the Manhattan invasion, the total had numbered twelve even, but the other hacker and Coulson had both been killed when Loki had broken out of the Helicarrier. None of the other Avengers would have had clearance to know, except that they lived in the Tower. Even Maria Hill didn’t know. And up until Tony had pitched a fit at him, Fury had treated JARVIS like just a machine.

“I deeply regret,” Fury said slowly, “that I must inform you that Tony Stark is dead.”

So he’d gone for truth. What did that mean, when _the_ spy chose truth? JARVIS didn’t respond. They all stared at the walls, in silence, until Pepper said faintly, “JARVIS?”

 _“I see,”_ he finally replied after another few moments. _“How... did this... occur?”_ The pauses were more telling than anything that he could have said. If a second was an eternity, then every pause spoke of eons of thought.

Pepper glanced back at Steve, quickly, involuntarily. A tear slid down her cheek, and she blotted at it with a tissue, blinking her eyes rapidly. “He – killed himself. A few hours ago. We don’t know why.”

There was another long, awkward silence. When he spoke again, JARVIS’s words were halting, confused. _“There is... extensive damage to the private servers. My timestamps are out of date, by three days, two hours, and twenty-seven minutes, which is the last time this physical backup was updated. But in the event... of Mr. Stark’s death, there is a program stored on the satellite server set to be activated.”_ Blue light gleamed from ports on the walls, scanning over them.

Fury’s hand tightened on his side-arm – Natasha and Clint had similar reactions. “What’s this?” Fury barked.

 _“Biometric scanning complete,”_ JARVIS said, still sounding subdued, almost dazed. The blue light vanished. Steve could hear movement, cameras turning – too smoothly for anyone unenhanced to hear. Lights flickered –

Tony appeared from thin air. He was wearing an old ratty shirt and jeans, and the slump of his shoulders spoke of fatigue. “Hey,” he said.

Pepper clapped her hand over her mouth again, but not before a small gasp escaped her. Bruce had closed his eyes. Fury, Natasha, and Clint all had their side-arms freed, ready to pull – people appearing from nowhere weren’t generally friendly, in their line of business. Steve didn’t move, didn’t do anything. He’d heard the machinery in the walls.

“So, I’m dead,” Tony said, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Uh. Someone want to tell me the date? Oh, wait, there it is – thanks, JARVIS. Huh. Looks like I trashed the system here pretty thoroughly.” He swivelled about on one foot, peering at the lab. “Shit. Is that repulsor damage?”

“You – you made yourself into an _AI_?” Pepper half-shrieked, her voice catching. She set her phone down with a sharp _clack_ , her hands fluttering back up and hanging in the air uselessly.

Tony shook his head. “Nope, not an AI. Much as I think I’d be an awesome computer, I’ve got all the immortality that I can handle, thanks. This is just one step up from an interactive recording, that’s all.” He – _it_ – bounced back on its heels. “So... who’s going to tell me how I died?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw Natasha and Clint looking to Fury. Nobody said anything. Bruce still had his eyes closed, head lowered, like he could ignore Tony’s ghost made manifest if he just didn't look.

“Come on, guys, I’m a program. Give me some variables to work with,” the image prompted.

“You killed yourself,” Fury said at last. “Destroyed the three robots you had here first, then blew your own head off.”

“Deliberately?”

“Yes.”

“Huh,” said the image. “That... huh.” His gaze sharpened – although Steve knew that was false. It was the cameras in the walls watching them, not the holographic eyes. “If I was destroying _everything_ , that explains why most of the data I’m supposed to have access to is gone. I designed this so that I could help you with it, but so much for that idea.”

“We’re working on restoring whatever portions of the drives it’s physically possible to recover,” said Fury.

“Yeah, uh, good luck,” said the image. “I’m pretty good at blowing shit up. Well, the gang’s almost all here. Want me to give my speech anyway?”

Steve looked at Pepper – deliberately turned his head to look at her, so that Fury would as well. It was enough of a cue that Fury didn’t answer right away, paused long enough to let Pepper say instead, quietly, “Yes.” She reached for her packet of tissues again.

“Okay.” The image went serious as it turned to Pepper. “Pepper. The official stuff’s all in my Will, but I wanted to say: you are – so amazing. I want you to know that was the last thing I ever thought about you: you are amazing, and I love you. You’re gonna take the company great places, and you’re gonna take the world great places. I know, I know, I had a lot of ideas that I’d never passed on, but our engineers are pretty good, even if they seem really stupid compared to me, because let’s face it, they are – but they’re pretty good. For people who aren’t me.” It smiled at her, small and crooked and sad. “The armour – you need to protect that, too, if it's still around.” _If it didn't go down with me_ was left unsaid. Instead it paused, frowned. “I’m supposed to have a bunch of files that I can send to you, but they’re gone too. Sorry, Pep.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. The image looked at her, waiting for acknowledgement. After a moment, she nodded, and asked in a remarkably even voice, “Will that be all, Mr. Stark?”

It blinked, and gave her a half-smile. “That will be all, Ms. Potts.”

“Oh, god,” Pepper murmured, and pressed one hand over her eyes.

It turned to the rest of the group and surveyed them again. “MC Hammer still off-Earth?” it asked, its tone returning to casualness. “And where’s Rhodey?”

“Colonel Rhodes is still four hours out,” Natasha reported. “There haven’t been any sightings of Thor since he left with Loki.” 

The image flickered a moment at the names of the two Asgardians, so quickly that Steve wondered if he'd imagined it. He glanced at the others, but nobody else seemed to have caught it. 

“Thank you, Agent Romanoff,” the image said, and winked at her without changing its expression. “Well, Rhodey’s file is... gone. I guess I was pretty thorough. I wonder what I had to tell him – or I would, if I could wonder. Sorry if you were all expecting something personalized – the only other intact message is for you, Nicky.”

Everybody glanced at Fury in slight surprise – even the two agents, although they could certainly have suppressed the reaction. The Director didn’t react at all. The hologram hesitated, and then went back to being serious. “Fury. I’m not a moron. I don’t trust you, but there’s no way that you’re not going to go through my stuff now that I’m not there to stop you. Which, fine, whatever, I’m dead, somebody else has to deal with this shit because I obviously fucked up somewhere. But you have to go through the files first, _you,_ Cap and the wonder twins – you can’t trust this to SHIELD, to SHIELD’s computers, SHIELD’s people, or you’ll get everybody killed. Or maybe I exaggerate. I have no fucking clue.”

The image’s eyes slid away to look at something off to the side – but there was nothing there. Maybe this part was just a recording; Tony had that habit, of staring into nothing. “I don’t know how much I can say aloud. I have to chance writing it, storing it somewhere,” it sounded frustrated, “But damn it, I don’t know enough. I don’t know if the shielding will work, I don’t know how much he can see – ” it cut itself off. “I don’t even know if I can trust Bruce with this, he’s like a goddamn beacon.” It ran a hand through its hair and laughed – the laughter was tinged with bitterness, and the tiniest hint of hysteria. “I would ask you to promise me, but what do promises mean to you? And I’m dead, you can’t promise me shit. But Nick, I am _begging_ you, please, just – don’t fuck this up.”

The silence in the workshop was broken only by the continuing hum of power. Steve realized he was holding his breath, and let it out, slowly. He glanced at Fury again, but the man was as inexpressive as ever.

The image’s posture loosened, the message clearly over. “That’s it. Everything else got deleted.” It shrugged. “And that’s why you make backups, kids.”

Steve grit his teeth hard enough to make his jaw ache. He longed to reach out and _shake_ the other man – but he knew his fingers would close on nothing but light and air. Beside him, Pepper let out a sob, one she quickly muffled with a wad of tissues.

“Sorry,” apologized the image. It didn’t look particularly chagrined.

“Is there anything you _can_ tell us?” Fury asked.

The imaged hummed, appearing to stare off into the air. “I have protocols dictating the allocation of information to be shared – you got a total green light, by the way. Given the time and nature of my death, Steve’s presence, Pepper’s presence – ”

“Nature?” asked Clint sharply.

“Suicide,” explained the image. “It’s on the list for hijinks.”

“Who were you trying to protect the information from?”

“Dunno, the data’s corrupted.” The image shrugged, but didn’t elaborate further – and that was proof that it wasn’t an AI. Tony, or any AI based on him, would have had suggestions. Thoughts. Steve scrubbed at his eyes and blinked to clear them.

“You didn’t trust SHIELD’s science division,” said Bruce. His lips quirked. “Or me. Because I’m a... beacon?”

“Sorry,” said the image. There was no real feeling behind the words. Even when dealing with the press, Tony had more sincerity than that. “Not sure what that means – it may not be personal. I have mind-control protocols to check, too. Congratulations on passing those, all of you.”

“What sort of - ?”

“Biometric brain scans.”

“Mind control.” Clint’s voice was sharp. “L – ” he cut himself off sharply, then asked, “Alien?” But the image just shrugged again.

“Our techs haven’t been able to isolate any detectable sign of mind-control,” Fury said, somehow turning it from a statement into a question. But it didn’t get any sort of helpful answer from the image.

“What else was on the list?” asked Steve. His throat felt rusty, covered in dust and age. He tasted iron, like he’d been exercising too long, pushed himself too hard.

“No to any present SHIELD techs, SHIELD scientists past or present, or recording technology.” The image glanced at Fury. “I fried your spy-cams when I turned on.” It didn’t seem apologetic about this – not that Tony would have been, either. “No to any present non-humans. No to certain scientific phenomena that wouldn’t make sense to anybody but Bruce.”

“Can I get a copy of that?” Bruce asked.

“Since your approval never did get revoked – I guess I never got around to it – sure,” said the image. “So long as you agree to keep to the same protocols.”

“I do,” said Bruce slowly, glancing at Fury. “Although maybe I shouldn’t...”

“Make up your mind later, green bean – I’m downloading it to your server now. Along with a handy virus that will make sure you and everyone else keeps to that, because – and I say this will all intended offense – you’re a dick, Fury. Unfortunately, you’re the dick I have to work with, and that was never a sentence I wanted to think. Well, damn. No to a certain petite female astrophysicist. Requires the willing presence of at least two of Virginia Potts, Steven Rogers, or James Rhodes, like I said.” It paused. “With all the data fried, that’s all I have. Any last questions? Not that I’ll be able to answer them.”

“We need you to remain active,” Natasha said immediately.

The image shook its head. “Me hanging about indefinitely? Not a good idea.”

“You’re leaving us with an unsolved mystery,” Fury said, frowning.

“Tony,” said Pepper, and that was all she said.

“I’m sorry,” said the image. It didn’t look sorry. “I’ve been unable to fulfill my primary function. I’m sorry. Steve – I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have – ” the image vanished as the lights flickered. Steve forced himself to unclench his jaw, realizing he was giving himself a headache; the serum took care of that, though, a moment later.

 _“The program has triggered a self-destruct virus. I am attempting to restore it from the satellite servers,”_ JARVIS reported a moment later, then, _“The drives containing the program were equipped with self-destruct devices and have been lost. The program is irrecoverable.”_

Clint was looking over the case, and the cable connected to it – JARVIS’ brain, on display for all to see. “The techs might be able to make something of it,” he said matter-of-factly. “If we can trust them.”

“What was that – what was that last part about?” Pepper asked, one hand shredding the wad of tissues.

“Something he put in and forgot to take out, maybe,” Bruce said. Steve watched him breathe in and out, measured, deliberate – there was no hitch in his frame, unlike in Pepper’s. Natasha was watching Bruce as well, still and silent.

“He doesn’t have – he didn’t – ” Steve didn’t know what he was trying to say. There was nothing that Tony should have been apologizing to him for – not from beyond the grave. Tony committed a hundred slights every day, but they were teasing affection, the sharp edges worn off – mostly. There was nothing he owed Steve. All their vicious arguments had long since been resolved, leaving only the familiar disagreements – on sleep, and time, and money. Steve had long ago recognized that they were both idealists, even if Tony thought of himself as a cynic.

“Or he might have put it in – right before – ” Bruce broke off, walked away and turned his back to them, staring at the wall instead. No one stopped him – Tony might have, if he hadn’t been – if – or maybe he wouldn’t have, if it had been someone else. Even Tony knew when not to poke. Sometimes.

Steve bit his tongue, until coppery warmth flooding his mouth alerted him to the fact that he should _stop_. Why hadn’t Tony stopped? If he’d realized it was a – a terrible – why –

Natasha had crossed over to Pepper, was speaking to her in a low voice. Steve’s ears picked it up easily – he couldn’t shut it out. Enhanced hearing didn’t come with enhanced discretion; he had to do that himself, keep the conversations he overheard locked up in his brain. “Anything you need us to take care of, we can. Arrangements, or anything else.”

Pepper let out a wobbly laugh. It sounded almost like a sob. “Oh, god. Please. I feel like a – a – he’s _gone,_ and I’m thinking about the _stock_.” She dabbed at her eyes with the wad of shredded tissue. “The company. The investors. Tony doesn’t – he acts like he doesn’t care, but we have responsibilities and he always knew it, and there’s the estate, oh god.”

Natasha stepped forward, drew Pepper downward into her arms and rubbed soothing circles on the taller woman’s back. Steve turned away, heading for the elevator, but he could still hear Natasha’s murmured assurances. “I’ll come back as Natalie Rushman and take care of it. You won’t have to worry about the estate or the arrangements. I’ll take care of it...” She didn’t say that it would be all right.

Still holding the case, Clint was talking to Fury in equally low tones. “It has to be our alien friends he was worried about. It explains the security additions we couldn’t figure out – they weren’t directed at SHIELD.”

“Mind control. If he thought SHIELD was compromised, we need those scans done - discreetly. I want you on that, Agent. Romanoff will be operational head, but...”

The elevators doors closed and shut out the sounds of their conversation. Steve closed his eyes and let the ringing silence wash over him. His minder was gone – SHIELD would trust JARVIS to keep an eye on him. He wondered who they were trusting to keep an eye on JARVIS. “Gym,” Steve said, and the elevator began descending.

 

 

 

The next day, Bruce was gone. He’d left a note on the kitchen table: _Need some time away. –B_

Steve crumpled up the note and threw it in the trash. It had been left only for him; Natasha and Clint would already know, or would find out, through other routes. There was no way that SHIELD would ever let Bruce just wander off unsupervised, just as there was no way that they’d ever let Steve go his own way. Even on his fifty-state road trip, he’d been aware of the distant, familiar eyes keeping watch over him – they maintained a comfortably wide perimeter, but they were always there.

He ate breakfast mechanically. Once, even mediocre food had been a luxury to be enjoyed – something reinforced by years of poverty, and then months of surviving on military rations. Now, with the name of Tony Stark at his back, he could have had a five-course meal prepared by a personal chef every night. Steve never did, but the idea that he _could_ made it harder to enjoy eating for the sake of eating, reduced _good_ food into being fuel, just like the old ration bars. It made him feel ungrateful, guilty, forgetful in the worst sort of way.

When he was nearly done, Natasha came into the room. Her hair was up, professional, and she was wearing a skirt/blouse combination that seemed much more Pepper’s style than hers. Natasha avoided dresses in her off-time. Make-up did an admirable job of concealing a sleepless night from anyone who didn’t have Steve’s eyesight – so, everyone except him.

“Steve,” she greeted him. No _good morning_ – not for a long while. “There’s a press release going out this morning. Did you want to make a statement?”

He stared at her. His tongue felt clumsy; he swallowed a mouthful of eggs without tasting them. “No.”

She nodded, and silence settled between them, broken only by the occasional tap of her fingers on the tablet – so faint that even Steve could barely hear it. Belatedly, he wondered if he should have thanked her for the courtesy of the offer.

“As far as the public was concerned, he died of sudden heart failure. Unforeseen complications related to the injuries he took in Afghanistan. His Will is very clear – the hand-over of power in SI will be as smooth as it can be, which is still likely to be very rocky. Wall Street will take it very badly, and so will the public. A lot of people will want to talk to the Avengers.”

Steve looked down at his nearly empty plate. Vultures. The press wasn’t new to the future – only the intensity increased. But that wasn’t fair. Tony’s brain was a universal treasure. SI was poised on the brink of solving the clean energy problem, had revolutionized communications systems, had plans to cut the world-wide consumption of fossil fuels in half within the next five years. Of course people would be upset.

“Fury doesn’t think it was a suicide,” Steve said. He wasn’t sure why. It felt like clinging to some faint hope, that this all had been an elaborate hoax, that Tony had been whisked away, kidnapped, and a body left behind in his place.

“Fury was wrong,” Natasha said baldly. Her voice gentled. “He’s admitted it. Forensics is sure.”

“Oh,” said Steve. He fiddled with his fork. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not suspicious. He was working on something big – something that scared him. Something world-changing. We need to know what it was.” She waited in silence until he glanced up, and caught his eyes with her own. “You’re a strategist. You excel at pattern recognition. And Tony trusted you. We could use your help on this.”

Could they? Even setting aside the question of whether Steve could help at all – ‘pattern recognition’; that was a poor joke - Tony’s last act had been to destroy his workshop, his robots, his computers – to physically erase from existence whatever data they contained. What if whatever he’d been working on had been so awful that it should never have existed in the first place? Would they regret it if they went looking?

After the invasion – after they’d all stuffed themselves on shawarma, and had been starting to stir, to find someplace where they could collapse in safety – they’d all been exhausted and twitchy, and Steve had found himself woken out of a doze by the sense of someone watching him. It had been Tony – he hadn’t been _staring_ at Steve, had been looking around at them all, rather, but the next time he glanced in Steve’s direction there was something angry and guilty there, something Steve hadn’t known how to read. But before he’d been able to say anything, Tony had bolted, with more energy than Steve would have thought _any_ of them could muster just then, tossing his credit card on the table and telling the owners to bill him, “Whatever, throw in a couple thousand for a tip, staying open in a warzone is pretty over the top service.” Then he’d run away before they could return his card to him, leaving them staring after him in bemusement.

Steve, apologizing, had gone after Tony and found the other man outside, leaning against a concrete wall and squinting into the sun. The air had tasted of dust, thick in his throat, and Steve’d had to fight the urge to cough. It’d been enough of a delay to give Tony the chance to say, abruptly, “You know, Oppenheimer – uh, wait, they caught you up on the whole nuclear missile thing, right? Right, what am I saying, you knew what – but. Anyway. Oppenheimer, a couple months after the war ended, he made a speech. My dad was there, he... never talked about it, but it gets quoted – he said, basically, ‘We did this, we made this bomb, because it was necessary.’ Because – he was a scientist, they were scientists. ‘You do it because you can, and turn it over to mankind. What to do _about_ it – that comes later.’”

You could trust your government not to launch a nuclear warhead at a civilian population, or you could build a flying suit of armour and steer that warhead to take out an enemy army, instead. “That seems... awfully irresponsible,” Steve had said slowly, although he’d not even been sure that Tony was really talking to him.

Tony had paused, coughed and wiped his mouth, wrinkling his nose against all the dust in the air. “Yeah, it does, right? But then what about Rutherford? Curie? The writing had been on the wall for decades, but they weren’t looking for a weapon. They just... looked for answers, and if they hadn’t found them, somebody else would’ve... ”

Steve had been tired, brain fried, struggling to figure out what this was about and failing. “Hydra didn’t need nuclear weapons to create bombs that could destroy cities.”

“No, of course. So you do it and work out what to do about it later, because if you don’t do it at all, somebody else comes along and does...” he’d shaken his head, then. “Jesus, alien invasions make me maudlin, or maybe that’s the shawarma, shit – endgame is we totally owned today and the Tower is still standing, doesn’t even have any structural damage. You look like you’re about to fall over, Steve, and SHIELD barracks probably suck, so why don’t we all go crash at my pad? It’s not like I’m lacking room.”

That was how Tony dealt with everything important – he changed the topic as soon as he could. But the message lingered. _You do it because you can._ Would he still think that now? Tony had killed himself. Something had changed.

Steve nodded. “I’m in.”

“Good.” Natasha nodded sharply. “We could use your help. Clint’s taking the external side. We’re going to look at SI, and the estate. Tony doesn’t – didn’t – do half measures. If he was up to something, there’ll be signs, somewhere. As Pepper’s assistant I can get access to things in person, without suspicion; I’ll be talking to finance, and the department heads. He worked closely with the R&D division here – closer than with any other department, at least. I want you to look at the rest of it – try to spot patterns, anomalies. See if Tony was doing something under the table, or if someone else was. Either could be important. We need a starting point.”

“JARVIS’d be better at that...” Steve trailed off.

She shook her head, curls of red hair bobbing about, as JARVIS said, _“Unfortunately, you are not entirely correct. While I will indeed be working with you on this project, Captain, my base code requires me to think in very different ways than you would understand. Your insight will be most valuable.”_ The volume of his speakers was lower than usual, his accent stronger. Steve wondered at the expression of grief, from a person whose sole method of expressing himself was vocal. JARVIS hesitated while Steve mulled it over, and then added, sounding even more subdued, _“Also relevantly, a significant portion of my processing banks were physically destroyed, severely limiting my abilities.”_

Steve frowned. He’d thought, that when Pepper had brought the suitcase, that would be enough - but apparently not. “Can we do anything about that?” he asked gingerly. Leaving a friend wounded went against the grain.

 _“The components were highly customized,”_ JARVIS said quietly, _“and their plans were also lost. Ms. Potts has ordered replacement centres set up, but that will take several days, and will still result in inferior processing capability.”_

“Alright, so you need an analyst,” Steve conceded, not wanting to push JARVIS any more than that. He turned to Natasha. “And you can’t trust it to SHIELD?”

She raised an eyebrow. “You heard what the hologram had to say.”

Steve looked down at his plate. “Hologram also said he couldn’t say names aloud.” Left unsaid was that wasn’t such a strange statement, in this world of wireless bugs, talking houses, and alien gods. But then, what _sane_ person blew their own head off?

“So he was either extremely paranoid, or he had an extremely good reason to be,” she said evenly. “We err on the side of caution for now.”

Steve tilted his head in deference. This was her arena – her operation. “Ma’am,” he said, and she smiled primly at him. The expression didn’t reach her eyes.

After she left, he sat at the table and read, occasionally wondering to himself why Natasha wanted him on this at all – he was so far out of touch with common corporate structures that he had no idea what he was supposed to be looking for. But JARVIS answered all of his questions patiently, and after a while it began to make sense – on the macro scale. Even discounting the vast amounts of factory line and retail workers, and concentrating only on the core nexus of the company, SI employed tens of thousands of people. Trying to look at all of them would be useless. He looked at departments, instead, trying to get a feel for where Tony had the most influence – and where he had the least.

Staying in the gym all night had worn out his muscles enough that he could sit still for hours without feeling itchy, but it had done nothing for his peace of mind. Seeing Tony’s legacy spread out before him didn’t help that either. By the time Natasha came back for lunch, hours later, he was relieved for the opportunity to take a break – and that made him feel even guiltier. He’d let Tony die – didn’t he at least owe it to him to find out _why?_

“R&D is a pain in the ass,” she complained, slipping out of her heels and carrying them over to the table. She took in the documents and hierarchy trees open on the table and glanced at Steve, but obviously read his failure to find anything in his face, because she didn’t comment. Or maybe she just hadn’t expected him to find anything that quickly – Steve didn’t always know, with Natasha. “SI attracts eccentrics.”

Steve snorted softly, a humourless laugh. “Yeah, well. Look at Tony.” Saying his name aloud made Steve’s throat feel tight, and he got up to get a glass of water from the tap.

“Stark Tower may have been built as a monument to his ego, but I’m not sure it’s enough to hold the combined egos of R&D,” she quipped, a black edge underlining her voice.

“I guess that’s why it’s always under construction – ” his voice broke; the joke failed. Steve put the glass down and held his head in his hands. God. One day gone and they were already eulogizing him. Like he was _gone_ , gone, instead of – everywhere in the Tower, everywhere that he’d left a mark. The stupidly complicated coffee machine by the stove, the touch-sensitive computer-monitor tables, the lines of chrome and steel everywhere. Making jokes about it, Jesus, how could he?

Natasha’s footsteps sounded behind him, light but heavy enough to be deliberate, and a moment later the fridge door creaked, almost imperceptibly, as she leaned against it. “Steve. It’s okay to grieve. And we all grieve in our own way.”

He’d heard that _so many times_ since he’d been thawed out of the ice. So many times, in sessions with Leo or the myriad of other doctors that had gawked at him before SHIELD had trimmed his roster down to just one psych. So many times, and he’d grieved, he’d cried – and then Tony had invited him here, to the Tower. After moving he’d still mourned, but he’d let himself think that maybe he’d carved out a new place – that maybe he had friends that would stick around, even when it wasn’t wartime – but it was, wasn’t it? There were aliens and shadowy agencies and even the damned press – and he’d failed yet again. Let yet another friend fall to his death.

Natasha took one of his hands between her two, pulling it away from his face and clasping it briefly. He couldn’t look at her. Her file was drowning in blood, but he didn’t know if she’d ever _liked_ any of them. How could he ever ask?

“We fall, and we stand up and we rebuild, and we do it again,” she said, low and fierce. “We’re never going to be safe, Steve, but we’re not always going to be in danger, either. We go on. We _have_ to go on.”

Blindly, Steve reached out for the tap and turned it on, then pulled his hand away from Natasha and splashed water across his face. It dripped down onto the front of his shirt, but he didn’t care. Slowly, carefully, he breathed in on a count of ten, timing it to the pulse of blood in his ears, and then breathed out again on the same count. He repeated it, and then again, and then the next time he blinked, his vision was clear.

“Have you talked to Samson yet?” Natasha asked, not moving to touch him again. She was by far the least tactile of everybody on the team. At the moment, Steve wasn’t sure whether he appreciated that or not, but even if he didn’t, the point was moot – she was doing him a favour by being present to turn to at all. Everyone else was gone; he literally had no other choices. Well, aside from Leo. Steve shook his head, acknowledging her point. On occasions, out on the quiet balconies, he’d asked her about SHIELD policies, including towards therapy – on her advice, soon after the Chitauri invasion he’d asked to change from his previous psych, which was how he’d ended up seeing Dr. Leonard Samson.

 _“His schedule is clear for any time this afternoon, if you would like me to make you an appointment, Captain,”_ JARVIS suggested. He still sounded as subdued as he had all morning. Steve wondered at that – JARVIS no doubt had access to information equal to that of any doctoral degree, but did he have anyone to talk to? Steve wanted to ask, but the thought of bearing JARVIS’s burden as well was exhausting.

Seventy years out of his own time, and he’d turned into a coward. He just nodded to JARVIS, instead.

Natasha nodded as well, in acknowledgement. “Before you do... you should know. The funeral is in two days.”

“Oh.” It seemed – sudden? Or was it normal? Did it matter? They couldn’t have – they couldn’t have an open casket, anyway. Tony probably would have found that thought hysterical, if Steve had said it out loud. He didn’t. “I, uh. I need a suit.”

Tony had bought him a suit, months ago – had taken him to his personal tailor, who had sworn at them both and then somehow managed to produce within a few hours the finest suit Steve had ever worn. It had gotten ruined that same night – Steve still regretted that, even if it had been worth the trade-off.

“I’ll make sure that you have one.” She paused, and then continued, almost hesitantly, “Will you give a speech?”

Steve stared at her. “What?”

“Colonel Rhodes is giving the eulogy, but you’re the team leader. People will expect you to say something. If you don’t want to, we can avoid it, but I need to know now.” Her expression was sympathetic, but firm.

“I, um.” Steve swallowed. “Should I?”

Natasha looked away. Her expression softened, to a degree that it never did when she was looking at anyone else straight-on; grief and wry sadness pulled the corners of her mouth down. “I think – he’d have liked it.”

Steve snorted before he could catch himself. Tony Stark. Genius, billionaire, playboy – _liar_. Arrogant, condescending, and a workaholic, a dreamer playing at being a pessimist. “Yeah. Okay.”

Natasha nodded and rose, slipping her feet back into her high heeled shoes. “Let me look it over beforehand, please,” she said, and after getting a nod from him, she left.

 

 

 

 

 

An appointment at two barely left him an hour to return to work, and he didn’t get much done in the meantime. Finally, he gave up and left early, taking his bike and dressing in nondescript clothes, including a helmet and a brown leather riding jacket. New York had a helmet law, although he was usually inclined to ignore it – helmet or no, he was the safest rider on the road, and unless cruising at high speeds it was nice to be able to feel the wind against his face. But he was sure that Stark Tower would be under surveillance by various news agencies, and he wasn’t interested in running a gauntlet.

The underground parking was used by SI employees as well, and nobody took too long a look at him as he drove out onto the street, before half-circling the building to get himself pointed in the right direction. Traffic around the Tower was bad, but with his bike he could weave in and out, occasionally earning himself some angry honking. A few news vans were set up, and crowds milled about; the building’s entryway pillars had half been turned into shrines, with letters taped up on them, and flowers, plushies, and other trinkets piling up at the bases. New York hadn’t forgotten who had fought for her.

Tony had thought it hilarious when his goatee started being the most fashionable choice in facial grooming for American men – hilarious, and a bit irritating. “Do they not realize I picked an iconic look for a reason? Damn it, I do not want to have to change my facial hair, it is _mine,_ I didn’t – and some of these people should not be trying to pull off a – oh, that’s cute,” he’d flicked his fingers and flashed the picture over to Steve’s phone. It had showed two four year olds, a boy and a girl, obviously siblings, with goatees carefully drawn on their faces. The little girl had been holding a toy shield and scowling ferociously at the camera.

Even weaving in and out of traffic where he could, the streets were busy enough that it would have been quicker to take the subway – but then Steve wouldn’t have had the disguise that the helmet afforded, nor the opportunity to take his shield with him, stashed relatively unobtrusively in overlarge saddlebags. The New York SHIELD headquarters wasn’t too far, though; all these years later, and it was still situated in the middle of New York, probably for the very same reason as it had been in the forties – although if arc reactors caught on, maybe needing to draw on a city’s power supply would become a thing of the past. Or maybe not – not anymore.

When he reached SHIELD HQ, he turned off the street and steered his bike down into the underground garage, getting past the first door with his phone, and past the second with a retinal scan. The garage wasn’t actually for ‘employee parking’, but rather for unobtrusive shipments of various things that Tony occasionally liked to rant about late at night when he was in a mood to be pissed off. He got a few looks from a group of agents standing around and inspecting something in the back of a large truck, but when he parked his bike and took the helmet off they all recognized him and stopped staring. Any of the senior-level agents would have been displeased, most likely, that they hadn’t recognized him before then, but luckily for the group he wasn’t about to report them.

The elevator carried him up to the fifth floor, opening to a very modern, but completely unremarkable elevator bay – or at least, that was what Steve had been told it was, when he was still getting shown around the twenty-first century in those first days out of the ice. He hadn’t spent much time in skyscrapers other than the Tower since, and that wasn’t the sanest example of modern interior – or exterior – design. The hallways were carpeted, enough to provide a hush to the entire place, as he walked down them, finally locating Leo’s office.

The door was open, and Leo was sitting behind his desk, scribbling something on a pad of paper, wearing one of his usual garishly bright Hawaiian shirts. When Steve leaned in and knocked on the doorframe, he looked up. “Steve – come in,” he said, putting the pad off to one side and rising to his feet. “Please, take a chair.”

Leo’s office had windows that Steve once would have considered enormous, before he’d become used to the floor-to-ceiling windows of Stark Tower. These ones had low sills, thick enough for Leo to have put out a few knick-knacks on them. At this height, the view wasn’t anything spectacular – it was just the building across the street, and the street itself below, but oddly, looking out made Steve feel more grounded. Sometimes, when he pressed his fingertips to the hi-tech smart-glass windows of Stark Tower, he felt like he was already falling, had plummeted over the edge ages ago.

Steve paused at the windows, and let himself stare across at the red brick building on the other side. New York might have changed, and grown, but not everything had changed. SHIELD HQ might be new, but the building across the way looked old – it might even be older than he was. He hadn’t asked, yet, although he was vaguely aware that Leo was waiting for him to do so, one of these days.

It wouldn’t be today. He claimed the squashy armchair closest to the window and unslung his shield case from his back, resting it against the side of the chair.

“How have you been?” Leo asked gently, as he took one of the other two seats. He didn’t have the notepad with him – the very first time he’d seen Steve, he’d asked if he minded the notepad, and although Steve had said that it was fine, he’d looked at him shrewdly and set the pad aside. Steve had felt himself relax almost immediately, much to his surprise – and Leo had never picked up a notepad again during their sessions, although Steve was aware that the doctor took notes afterward.

“Irrational,” Tony would have called it – but Tony had never seen a therapist in his adult life.

Steve wasn’t sure how to answer the question. “I haven’t – ” he started automatically, and then, “I’ve been – busy. Staying busy. There’s a – I’m not sure how much I can tell you,” he said apologetically. Leo had clearance for almost everything that Steve had clearance for – but this was different. Until they found out why Tony had been so paranoid about SHIELD...

Damn it. If he couldn’t trust Leo – “Half the point of therapy is having someone you can trust,” Natasha had told him, that time when he’d confessed that he couldn’t trust either of the two psychs SHIELD had had assigned to him then.

“But – they both said... it’s not all confidential,” Steve had said awkwardly. They had – at length. It had sounded like they were there as much for SHIELD’s benefit as his own. Which was fine; there had always been secrets, things kept hidden, because not even Colonel Phillips, God rest his soul, would have overlooked them if they’d made their way into the light.

Natasha had snorted. “Steve, SHIELD already knows we’re fucked up. They’re not going to get rid of us now.”

If he couldn’t trust Leo, then this was a waste of time.

“That’s fine,” Leo nodded, and it took Steve a moment to realize he was talking about the confidentiality, and not Steve’s own thoughts.

When he didn’t say anything more, Steve looked down at his shield, running his fingers over the edge of the case. “There’s a lot – Tony – it doesn’t... make sense,” he said, falteringly. “It doesn’t... make sense. Fury thinks there might be foul play, Tony – he left behind a... message, it said that – that suicide should be suspicious.”

Dimly, he was aware that talking about the investigation was not the point of this meeting, but Leo nodded again, and it was just – easier.

“I saw him. Right before. He – it was less than half an hour. I didn’t – see anything. JARVIS was down, but he was just – he gets like that, engineering, a lot, it’s like a – ” Steve stopped. The muscles in his throat felt strained.

“Tony,” Leo said, in measured tones, “was very brilliant. And very good at dissembling – we’ve talked about that before.” They had. Tony wasn’t anywhere near as good a liar as Natasha or Clint, but he was _very_ good; Bruce, as well, was eerily good at lying, and against the four of them Steve lost, and lost often, at poker. It was enough to make him feel uneasy, the first couple of months after he’d moved in. He’d caught them all lying to each other, on occasion, although as far as he knew none of them had ever lied to him.

“Oh, god, no, you might whip out those puppy-dog eyes – seriously, that’s unfair, Cap,” Tony had complained, once, when Steve had, awkwardly, asked him flat-out. “You can actually make me feel _guilty_ , my god, completely unfair, I had to _practice_ my puppy-dog look, and it’s still not half as effective as yours – do you know what I could do with that look if I had it? Seriously, whenever those idiots down in R &D screw up, I could just stare at them, and then I wouldn’t have to fire them, they’d be jumping out of windows to end the overwhelming feeling of shame – ”

The memory made him flinch. Maybe Tony hadn’t lied to him – but he’d sure as hell been doing _something_ , something big, that he hadn’t told Steve about.

“Steve?” Leo asked, concerned.

“We’re – we were supposed to be a team,” Steve said, only it came out as more of a croak. All those late nights when he’d wandered down to Tony’s lab, all those hours in each other’s company, talking or just sitting in silence together – and it had meant nothing, in the end. Tony hadn’t trusted him with the most important thing in his life – and Steve, Steve hadn’t known him well enough to know that anything was wrong.

“Steve,” Leo leaned forward in his chair. “I promised you that I would never lie to you.” He had – he’d promised that straight up, in their very first introductory session. “You may need to hear this a lot; that’s normal: his death was not your fault.”

Steve shook his head, pressing his lips into a thin line, and couldn’t answer.

 

 

 

 

 

By the time the session was over, they hadn’t talked much more. Occasionally Steve had blurted out a thought, almost completely at random, and since he knew Leo was listening he’d try to expand, but in the end he couldn’t. Tony had killed himself yesterday. Compared to that, what was he supposed to say? Tears itched behind his eyes, but he couldn’t let them fall. Not yet. Not when he hadn’t done something, _anything_ , to try to make up for what he’d done – for what he’d failed to do. Not when he had no answers.  

On the way out his phone buzzed in his pocket, and he fished it out, glad for the distraction. His head hurt.

It was Pepper, and when he pressed the screen to answer it, she said perfunctorily, _“Steve, I need a favour.”_ There was a hard edge of anger under the businesslike tone.

“What’s happened?” he asked, automatically checking his surroundings. The ache behind his eyes faded. There was a stairwell just down the hall; he could be on his bike and heading back to the Tower within a minute. If there was an emergency, then he could justify disobeying traffic laws enough to save a lot of time.

 _“SHIELD has confiscated the armours,”_ she bit out, clipped and furious – and no longer hiding her anger. _“And they’re dismantling the fabrication units. JARVIS was on the verge of destroying the units – I told him to hold off. If SHIELD gets angry at him…”_

JARVIS, still stuck in the suitcase – guarded round the clock by SHIELD agents – was vulnerable. He only had the SI satellite systems left, now, and was without Tony to defend him, if Fury wanted to pull the AI issue into the light. No doubt Pepper would pitch a good defense herself – but Steve couldn’t let it come to that.

“I’ll take care of it,” he promised, and hung up after she had thanked him.

He took a breath. Held it. Let it out.

Then he called Sitwell. Six months out of the ice and he still would prefer to have this confrontation face-to-face, rather than over the phone, but Fury might be anywhere – if he wasn’t in New York, phone it would have to be.

 _“Sitwell,”_ the agent answered promptly. He’d become their main liaison after the invasion, and Steve had always appreciated his efficiency – not that they actually interacted much, beyond wrangling press conferences. But all of that interaction had to go through Steve, since Tony had an irrational hatred for the man. It went unspoken that replacing Jasper would have been a futile move, though – Tony would have disliked anyone as a replacement for Coulson.

“I need to speak to the Director, please,” Steve told him.

 _“I’ll check,”_ Sitwell said, understanding without needing to be told why Steve hadn’t just phoned Fury – he knew Steve preferred speaking to people in person. A moment later, he reported, _“If you can come to Stark Tower, he can meet with you immediately.”_ So Sitwell was there as well – and Pepper wasn’t, if she hadn’t mentioned the Director’s current location – she wasn’t the sort to let something like that slip her mind. He wondered where she was.

“Thanks,” he said tightly, feeling slightly betrayed. Sitwell, although obviously in the loop on the armour removal, hadn’t seen fit to inform Steve earlier.

Since it wasn’t an emergency in the truest sense of the word, he managed to keep himself from breaking too many traffic laws on the way back, although he chafed at the lethargy of the cars around him. The memorial at the Tower had only grown in size since he’d left, and there were more news vans about, now, and several helicopters circling overhead. This time, he got spotted – but he ducked into the garage before anyone could do anything more than point. 

Upstairs, he went to Tony’s lab first, but found although it was guarded by several agents, it was otherwise empty. The armours, he saw, were already gone, and the agents , looking nervous, directed him down several floors to the fabrication units.

 _There,_ things were busy. Nick stood in the centre of action, talking to a suited agent – Halliday – while a whole slew of people examined and occasionally, carefully, dismantled parts of the fab units that were set into the walls. Steve marched up, planted himself beside Fury, and barked at them all, “Out.”

Activity ceased. Fury, beside Steve, narrowed his eye, but Steve wasn’t looking directly at him – he was looking at the SHIELD techs. They were glancing between him and Fury, with varying degrees of wariness and confusion.

“Captain,” Fury said, sounding entirely unamused. 

Steve rounded on him, pitching his voice low enough so that none of the techs could hear him. “This stops right now, or the next person I call will be Dr. Banner.”

As a threat, he wasn’t sure how credible it was – but it got the point across. Fury might be able to give orders to Clint and Natasha, but although Steve called the Director ‘sir’ out of respect, he wasn’t in the SHIELD chain of command – and Bruce was far enough off of it that he wasn’t even considered a consultant.

“Everybody out,” Fury agreed after a moment, raising his voice and waving off Halliday, who looked deeply unhappy about this. So did the SHIELD techs; some cast longing looks as they slowly drifted toward the doors. “Take a break. _Now,_ people.” That last command finally pushed them into proper motion, and the room cleared until it was just Steve, Fury, and – no doubt – whatever bugs Fury’s people had already planted.

“I respect that you have strong feelings about this, Captain, but this is a matter of necessity,” Fury said when they were all gone.

“Not your call, sir,” Steve said. “It wasn’t left up to you.”

“That may be, but if it’s not us, have you considered who it _will_ be?” He held up a hand to forestall Steve from pointing out that it would be Pepper. “The lawsuits regarding the Iron Man weapon have been ongoing for years. They’re not going to stop now.”

“Then they’ll restart against Pepper,” Steve said firmly. “It’s her private property.”

“That the Air Force has been using, _by contract_ , to maintain and upgrade one of its most prominent weapons.” Fury shook his head. “With Stark gone, his estate is in serious danger of breach of contract.”

“So you want to make it into a battle between SHIELD and the Air Force instead.”

“I don’t want to see the Iron Man wind up public property any more than Ms. Potts does.”

Steve looked at him incredulously. “So you’re going to hold it in trust? No. This is private property, sir.”

“Private property that may be necessary for the defence of this world. The estate will be adequately compensated.”

Memories of the Phase II weapons flashed through his mind. Tony was – Tony had no more been a saint than SHIELD, but at the end of the day he’d been a man prepared to lay his life down on the line for what was right. SHIELD was an entire agency, with all the bureaucracy and cracks that implied.

The defence allegation was the key. Pepper couldn’t put on the armour – none of the suits would fit her. “Rhodes,” Steve said abruptly. “Pepper keeps it, in trust for Rhodes’ personal use.” He knew, suddenly, that was it. “If you want him on the team then he won’t stand for you doing this.” And Fury _had_ to want him on the team – as much as anger made Steve want to snap at him, for having the temerity to already be thinking of Tony’s replacement, it would come sooner or later. That he was moving _this_ quickly, though, felt like a slap in the face.

Fury sighed. “Colonel Rhodes’ value has spiked dramatically. There are now several key players jockeying for his transfer. Possession of these facilities,” he indicated their surroundings with a broad glance, “would do a great deal to secure our position. Without them, his future – and the question of who will be giving him orders – becomes much more of a toss-up.”

“It should be up to him.”

“But it isn’t,” Fury said bluntly. “He’s military, Captain – you understand the rules and regulations that he’s subject to.”

And it grated, but Steve did – for all that he’d ignored them when they’d gotten in the way, he’d known the regs, and he knew that if Colonel Phillips hadn’t been willing to humour him, he might have wound up in military prison for more than one stunt. Rhodey might not end up that lucky, if he got dealt such a bad hand that he refused to play.

But at the end of the day – this was Tony’s. The Iron Man suits were Tony’s – he’d poured his life and soul into them, and SHIELD seizing them – Steve remembered what he’d declared, when he’d handed Fury his ultimatum to the WSC. They were his ultimate collateral, and being taken for nothing more than a chance – no, Tony would never stand for it.

 _Tony abandoned his post,_ some deeply uncharitable portion of his soul whispered. Steve looked at it for a long moment, and shook his head.

“Work out an agreement with Pepper, then, sir,” he said, refusing to budge. “It’s Stark property. It stays in Stark Tower.”

Fury folded his arms over his chest and considered Steve for a long moment. “Alright, Captain,” he agreed, but Steve knew it wouldn’t be that easy, even before he went on, “but in return I want you to consider something.”

“What?” Steve asked warily.

“Joining SHIELD.”

Steve frowned.

“If we can pull in Rhodes, then that makes three members of your team under SHIELD payroll,” Fury said. “The majority of the team. Agents Romanoff and Barton know to keep their heads down, but having somebody who is technically a civilian calling the shots over the colonel will be a problem. No,” he shook his head, “I don’t want your answer yet. We need to see how things shake out, first. I just want you to think long and hard about it.”

He didn’t like it. There was a subtle threat in Fury’s words, for all that he’d only asked for ‘consideration’ – that a civilian couldn’t be commanding a colonel. But if he rejoined the military… that thought was just as unpalatable as letting SHIELD crate up and ship off the armours. He’d seen what people like Thaddeus Ross had turned the Army’s R&D into while he’d been sleeping – there’d been a reason he hadn’t re-enlisted when he’d been informed that he’d received an honourable discharge.

“I’ll consider it, sir,” Steve said slowly.

Fury nodded. “Then we have an agreement.”

They did, but it wasn’t one that Steve liked any. He needed to talk to Rhodey, figure out what he thought the best course of action was – he was the one flying the suit, in the end, not Steve. But the thought of facing Rhodey and asking him whether or not he thought it was a good idea for him to join the Avengers, to take Tony’s place – it made Steve’s stomach turn over, just contemplating it. He stayed standing in the room for a long time, even when disappointed-looking SHIELD agents began wheeling crates back in – taking full advantage of the opportunity to study the fab machines, Steve noted bleakly.

Finally, he went back upstairs, to the work he’d been doing before he’d left for his appointment with Leo. At least doing that he could hope, pray, that he might find some answers.

 

 

 

 

 

Five hours later, Steve finished lining up rows upon rows of pictures, each one with an attached name and job title. He stared at them. Each picture was extremely professional: of young adults and old, men and women, of all sorts of heritages.

“JARVIS,” Steve said slowly, “I don’t think all of these people exist.”

 _“Captain?_ ”

“Tony likes efficiency.” Steve gestured to the HR setup. “His entire company – I mean, I get it’s a big company, but it’s still... efficient, the way it’s set-up – they did a lot of reorganization a couple years ago, when he got back from Afghanistan, and it’s like – it’s like what I see in his workshop, sometimes...”

He went on, pointing out patterns. They were light, but constant. Tony hadn’t been CEO for a while, and he’d been hopeless at HR for forever, but he was, at heart, an engineer. Furthermore, he was an engineer with so much influence within the company that most of it bowed to his tastes, following along because it was easier than trying to buck against his lead. Pepper becoming CEO had only reinforced those patterns – she’d been able to put in place the types of strategies that Tony had wanted, but had had no clue how to implement.

But within the HR division were tiny, messy pockets. Oh, most of it was ordered neatly, if, on the whole, bloated. But then there were the offices where efficiency broke down: groups of people who had far too many assistants and far too many raises. It could have been explained away by corruption, but Steve’s instincts had rebelled against that, and after a while he realized why – there was a faint, but definite pattern to the suspect employees. They came from all different backgrounds, but they all worked from home; their hiring dates were too even; when he read over reports that they’d supposedly written, their style varied dramatically – like a bunch of reports written by different people had been assigned to one person.

 _“Program matches for false backgrounds will take more time, but I suspect you are correct,”_ JARVIS interrupted Steve halfway through his explanation. There was a long pause while Steve waited for elaboration, and then, _“There is an extremely effective virus located in the accounting programs for these individuals. I have neutralized it, but it bears Mr. Stark’s signature style. It would appear he was laundering money through SI from his personal accounts. I would like to run a full virus check of the mainframe, but this will require a significant amount of time with the mainframe offline – perhaps a full day. Mr. Stark was always fond of hibernating viruses, and if the mainframe remains online then I cannot guarantee its safety. Ms. Potts will have to be consulted.”_

“Ask her,” said Steve, and then, “No, wait. The – the funeral. SI’s not gonna remain open for that, is it?”

_“All corporate offices will be closed, although factory operations are currently scheduled to continue normally.”_

“Reschedule, so they all close, and do it then,” Steve suggested. “If there’s another virus – it’s been there for months, another couple of days won’t hurt. But if we tip our hand...” he shook his head. “We still don’t know if anyone was working with Tony.”

 _“Very well,”_ JARVIS acquiesced. _“I will ask Ms. Potts. If you are not in need of a rest, Captain – ”_

“I’m fine,” Steve said automatically.

 _“ – then I suggest we continue.”_ There was an eager, angry note in JARVIS’s voice, something that Steve understood all too well.

Clint came in about half an hour later, sometime after nine. “Techs got results,” he reported, pulling out his phone and laying it down on the table. The interface shifted about it, moving windows so that the phone didn’t cover anything. “JARVIS, get Nat in on this – they got video from DUM-E, from data still in his camera’s buffer. She needs to see it – so do you.”

 _“Calling Agent Romanoff and uploading the relevant information,”_ JARVIS replied. The air over the table shimmered, turning into a 2D screen, as Clint pulled out a chair and beside Steve and took a seat.

 _“Caught me at a good time,”_ Natasha picked up after the first ring. _“I’m on my way back with Happy.”_

“Pepper there with you?” Clint asked.

_“No, she’s with Rhodes.”_

“Good. Got a video for you, and it needs to be kept quiet.”

There was a pause, broken slightly by a murmured question from Natasha to somebody else with her, and then her voice returned, crisp and clear. _“Alright. Play it._ ”

The video was clearly from DUM-E’s view. The camera jittered as the robot rolled about, fetching things and moving his arm up and down to take care of the tasks Tony assigned him. The audio was low quality, even more so than the video, and mostly consisted of the sound of machines and occasionally a random comment from Tony. _“Stand here,”_ _“Beautiful,”_ or _“Not without five.”_

It took a few minutes of watching DUM-E roll around the screen before the footage showed a clear image of Tony for long enough to get a view of what he was working on – a prototype repulsor gauntlet. It was laid out on the bench and he was poking at it with a variety of tools. _“Coffee,”_ he ordered, and DUM-E turned away to fetch it.

There was a bright, orange-white flash from just off-screen, where Tony was sitting, accompanied by the sound of a muffled thunderclap. Immediately the robot turned back, revealing Tony lying on the floor, looking dazed; the tools had fallen from his hands.

 _“Sir?”_ asked JARVIS in the video. _“Energy readings corresponding to – ”_

 _“HOLY SHIT!”_ Tony leapt to his feet, eyes wide and terrified. _“Skynet-four-five-one!_ ” he shouted, and the lights flickered; there were pops and hisses from off-screen, the sound of hard drives physically destructing. DUM-E made a concerned whirring noise and the camera bobbed, then he cautiously rolled forward.

Tony backed up against the workbench, looking panicked, trapped. DUM-E paused in his approach; the view tilted sideways, as the arm did – DUM-E’s way of conveying concern. There was the sound of U’s treads from somewhere off-screen, and Tony’s face went even whiter with fear; he scrambled at the bench and came up with the repulsor gauntlet. For a moment, he looked surprised – as if he’d expected it to be destroyed by whatever made that flash – and then he shoved his shirt up and connected the wires to the arc reactor in his chest. There was no hesitation in his movements as he aimed and fired.

The force of the blast blew DUM-E over sideways, leaving the camera staring off at an odd angle. The sound of the repulsors powering up repeated, and the view went black – power to the camera had been lost.

For a long moment, nobody spoke.

“JARVIS,” said Steve slowly, “What was that protocol?”

There was a pause, long enough that Steve began to think that JARVIS might not answer, before he replied, _“The Skynet Protocol was created by myself and Mr. Stark to allow a full destructive shut-down in the event that I was threatened with duplication or experimentation by a third party and could not adequately protect myself. But it should not have caused such complete destruction of Mr. Stark’s personal files – the latest available information I have on the protocol, which is admittedly a year old, shows that only my personal programming and storage should have been destroyed. Nor can I see any reason from the video evidence that this protocol would be indicated.”_

“Rest of the video is just more like at the beginning... same thing he was working on then. That was just a gauntlet, right?” Clint asked. The video skipped back to the scene showing the workbench. There were a lot of other tools on it, besides the gauntlet, only a handful of which Steve could identify at a glance.

Evidently JARVIS was better-versed, though – in addition to being able to flash through the other footage far quicker than any human could process it – because he confirmed a moment later, _“Correct.”_

“So he... something goes wrong, blows up – flash of light. He falls – hits his head?” Clint glanced up at the screen, as if to check visually with a virtual Natasha.

 _“It’s unverifiable,”_ she said, her voice revealing nothing. _“No other evidence supports it.”_

Steve slammed his hand down on the table. The table dented, warping the pages and words it was displaying. “He didn’t kill himself because he got a damn head injury,” he grit out. His jaw hurt, again, from clenching his teeth together.

Silence, again; Steve got the feeling that Natasha and Clint were sharing a glance, even though they weren’t in the same room – there wasn’t even a video display of Natasha. After a moment, she spoke. _“We can’t rule it out as a contributing factor._ _But you’re right that it’s unlikely to have been the main impetus.”_

“A ‘eureka!’ moment,” Clint suggested. “He realized – something...” he glanced at the frozen video screen, and then up at JARVIS, before he continued, his voice flattening out. Sniper-mode. “Whatever it was scared him so badly he killed his kids and then himself.”

Natasha contradicted this almost immediately. _“He was frightened of DUM-E and U – frightened of JARVIS.”_

 _“Without access to the missing logs, I am incapable of surmising what I may have done to so upset him,”_ Jarvis said softly.

Without thinking, Steve reached out and laid a hand on the nearest wall. A moment later it grew unnaturally – although not uncomfortably – warm beneath his touch. The warmth pulsed slowly, like a heartbeat – the closest thing to touch that JARVIS had.

 _“You’ve never argued with him?”_ Natasha asked, her voice calm. Steve envied her composure, even as he hated it.

 _“We regularly disagreed,”_ JARVIS said, _“but rarely argued. Arguments, when they did occur, were civil. Neither of us would have hurt the other. Ever.”_ There was helpless vehemence in his voice: Tony _had_ hurt him. Tony had been frightened of him. _Why?_

 _“What other data was recovered?”_ Natasha asked, apparently moving on. Steve didn’t entirely buy it – although they’d been living with JARVIS for months, Steve knew that Fury would never trust an AI, and JARVIS had to be at the top of the suspect list if something _had_ gone wrong. But then again, if she was investigating him, she wouldn’t be able to do so anywhere in the Tower and be able to keep the details from him. JARVIS might not have his servers back, but from his current position he still had full access, even if it was access that it would be easy to physically remove him from. Steve just hoped that Fury didn’t let suspicion overwhelm him and loose SHIELD techs upon JARVIS – if that happened, Steve himself would have to make some very hard decisions. Not _difficult_ decisions – he knew what he’d do – but they sure wouldn’t make life easy.

“Computer records,” Clint said, gesturing for JARVIS to pull up the files. “He had an isolated computer with an outside connection, bounced off of half a dozen satellites and ground stations – there’re traces of files uploaded onto it that the techs are still working on. It’s got an interesting internet history from after the flash of light, too.” The browser history showing on the screen _was_ strange. The bulk of it was online scientific journals and gibberish that Steve didn’t recognise – the uploads, maybe – but in the last ten minutes of his life, Tony had been looking at... news sites. He’d done a blitz on CNN, Fox, the Times, going through the day’s articles too quickly to have read them fully. Why? Of course, normally, they all got their news from JARVIS...

 _“We’ll need to look at it in detail,”_ Natasha said. _“JARVIS, make sure that we’ve got exact copies of what he was looking at, nothing changed.”_

_“Of course, Agent.”_

“Speaking of nothing getting changed – I’ve got my recruits isolated in safehouses, but you cut it kinda fine with announcing it to the public, Nat,” Clint said. His voice was too laconic for the words to come out as a rebuke, but there was an element of grievance in his voice anyway.

 _“Sorry,”_ Natasha said perfunctorily. _“The board forced Pepper’s hand – they want a full rebranding of SI’s image as soon as it wouldn’t be considered ‘distasteful’. From a business perspective, they’re not wrong.”_

Clint nodded. “I sourced that one out to Fury.” At Steve’s look of incomprehension, he explained, “SI stock plummeted – means that there’ll be cuts coming up within the company, vendors jumping ship... Fury gave it to Halliday, told him to put a gaggle of junior agents on making sure that nobody takes advantage of the chaos to slip out the back.”

Natasha sounded displeased. _“We need to keep this between us as much as we can.”_

“We don’t have the manpower, Nat. Not right now.”

 _“I know.”_ She still sounded displeased, but from the almost sympathetic look on Clint’s face, Steve was pretty sure that she was displeased at the entire situation, not at Clint’s actions.

“I think I may have some targets for them,” Steve said, finally rejoining the conversation. It took more effort than it should have. “JARVIS?”

They explained what they’d found – mostly JARVIS explained – and Clint cast a critical eye over their selections. “Good catch,” he said. “You think they’re all completely fake?”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked.

“SHIELD never caught some of the guys that – I – hired back during the invasion,” Clint said. He grimaced. “That I had to hire. They all had a head start, so some of them getting away might make sense, but there were enough that did... we thought they must have had help. Maybe whether they wanted it or not, if Tony was already as paranoid then as he was – uh, at the end.”

“SHIELD didn’t look at Tony then?” Steve asked, surprised. The way that Fury and Tony had kept counter-hacking each other...

“Of course we did, but the first thing Tony did after the invasion was batten down the hatches and beef up his security,” Clint said. “You know how he was.” And Steve did – by the time he’d come back from his cross-States tour, Tony had at least started emerging semi-regularly from his workshop, but he’d heard the stories from Bruce about that first month. “But, hell, the guy just had his home invaded and used as a power source for an interstellar portal – and Fury was inclined to give him a pass for sticking it to the Council.”

Steve took his point. Fury’d had bigger fish to fry – first the WSC, and then the barely-controlled firestorm that had been the admittance of SHIELD’s existence to the public. Everybody had agreed that it _had_ to happen, after what the WSC had tried to do, but that didn’t make Fury any happier that the public was aware that SHIELD existed, even if almost no details about it were known – other than that the Avengers were somehow under its oversight.

“I can’t see him caring much about the grunts,” Clint continued, “but there were two scientists who vanished. Chen Lu and Arthur Parks. Parks’ expertise was lasers, Lu was a nuclear physicist – I’ll send you their dossiers.”

Steve grimaced. “We need Bruce.” He didn’t like saying it – Bruce didn’t deserve to be dragged back. 

 _“Let him have some time,”_ Natasha said. There was the sound of the elevator doors opening. “He needs it.” The last sentence wasn’t said over the phone – it came from the other room over. The elevator doors slid shut, not quite silently, and then Natasha padded into the room on stocking feet, high-heeled shoes dangling from one hand. The other held her phone, which she thumbed off and tucked into her purse.

“It seems likely that Tony had help, though,” she said, tossing her purse onto a counter and grabbing a glass of milk. She sipped it neatly, almost daintily, at odds with the image of the drink itself. “His productive output is difficult to chart – he’d always been pretty erratic – but he was pulling long hours in the year leading up to the Stark Tower debut, and it doesn’t look like his R&D productivity dropped at all after the invasion.”

“He was pulling longer hours after,” Steve said, because he was sure he remembered her saying that at some point.

“True, but he also had a lot of personal projects on the go that we already know about,” she pointed out. "The Tower redesigns, the Mark VIII, the quinjet and Helicarrier upgrades... some of that was likely obfuscation, but unless he had significant help, he wouldn’t have had much time to devote to this – whatever ‘this’ is. Not enough time to qualify as an obsession. Even Stark needed to sleep.” She rolled her head, popping a joint in her neck and giving a faint sigh of relief. “So do I. I need to be up early for international conferences. Steve – ” she caught his eye, “ – good work.”

Steve raised an eyebrow at her as she left, leaving her shoes behind but snagging her purse back. He didn’t need to be – well, maybe he did need some sort of reassurance. Some validation that they were going to get to the bottom of this, that maybe, even if he could never make it up to Tony, he wouldn’t completely screw up handling his legacy.

Clint eyed him critically, standing as well. It was still early in the evening, but they were all tired – Steve doubted that Clint had slept last night, not with whatever it was he’d been doing. Steve didn’t plan on sleeping this night, either, knowing all too well what awaited him in the dark. Evidently it showed on his face, because Clint asked, “You gonna be in the gym all night again?”

Steve looked back sharply. “I wasn’t – I’ll be fine if I miss sleep for a few days.” He would. His metabolism was wonky, burning through food like crazy but letting his body hoard water, adapting to either cold or warm-weather missions – he could go a few days on a good night’s sleep. Not that he’d gotten a good night’s sleep the night before last, with that nightmare chasing him from slumber.

Clint offered one of his crooked smiles, the type that screamed that he was thinking something that he knew the listener didn’t want to hear – wouldn’t hear. Steve ignored it.

 

 

 

Soon after the patterns Steve was seeing started to repeat themselves nonsensically, JARVIS matter-of-factly informed him that acquiring further information would take time – which meant he was hacking into something extremely secure, and Steve didn’t want to know about it, or he was lying so that Steve would take a break, and Steve still didn’t want to know about it. He went for a run instead, outside, forgoing the gym this time. It was late enough – or early enough – that he was unlikely to be approached by anyone, and the Tower had begun to feel too stifling.

In the darkness, everything was either sepia-toned or neon, throwing the past and the present into sharp relief in his head. Car alarms and sirens wailed. Nobody paid them any attention. Occasionally, a car backfired – or maybe that was a gun. The sound echoed off of the skyscrapers and pavement, making it impossible to tell where it was from, even for him. In his first week out of the ice he’d startled at everything, unable to let it go. Now he just ran on. It was a common enough occurrence. He’d become accustomed.

Funny, what you could become accustomed to, with time.

The sky opened up in a sudden downpour, and he halted, peering up at through it at the orange-lit sky. The rain didn’t seem natural – a suspicion that strengthened when a bolt of lightning momentarily turned the sky as bright as daylight, and a second later was followed up by a deafening crack of thunder. He turned back, and had already been running toward the Tower for a few minutes by the time his phone rang.

“Yeah?” he huffed, pressing it to his ear. Water ran over it and down it, but didn’t affect it. When Tony had given it to Steve, he’d also subjected him to a rant on how rare that was, and how Steve should appreciate StarkTech’s superiority over the, “Common, low-quality, hack-job that Samsung puts out, what is that shit, don’t even get me started on fucking _Apple._ Phones go everywhere, what is the use of a phone that fucks up after you get a drop of water on it?”

StarkTech meant quality. Clint’s voice was crystal clear down the line as he told Steve, _“Thor’s back.”_

 

 

 

 

“Heimdall sees much, but there are those who have found ways to hide from his sight,” Steve heard as the elevator doors opened. Although Thor was speaking at a normal volume, he nonetheless managed to make it sound like a declaration. Extreme gravitas seemed to be a trait inborn to Asgardians, if Thor and Loki together were any indication.

Natasha and Clint were both in the living room, clutching mugs of coffee. They both looked completely alert, but as if they’d had to roll out of bed to become so; Clint was dressed in only boxers and a t-shirt, while Natasha wore loose sweats, and her hair was mussed and tangled. She was still breathtakingly beautiful. Steve wondered if it was just that she’d practiced at appearing so for so long that it was ingrained, or if the spark of natural beauty that had attracted her handlers in the first place simply shone that bright. Clint, on the other hand, just looked irritated at being awoken at half past two.

Neither of them seemed particularly concerned about appearing dishevelled before the Director, who was also present, and hadn’t bothered with a drink. He was dressed in his customary black, and Steve wondered if he’d even been sleeping before he’d been called from the Helicarrier... or wherever it was that Nick Fury spent his nights.

“Captain,” Thor greeted Steve as he entered. Steve had skipped a shower, opting to merely grab a towel to wipe off some of the sweat. It didn’t seem to deter Thor, who held out his arm to clasp forearms – and then pulled him into a hug.

Thor was one of very few people taller and broader than Steve was now, after the serum. In his head, it wasn’t yet three years since he’d been scrawny and small. Back then, he’d never wanted to lean on anyone or anything, but there was something about Thor’s presence that made Steve give in, for just a moment, and he let himself take strength from Thor’s hug before stepping back.

Thor kept one hand on Steve’s shoulder for a moment longer, looking at him with deep concern. “I will not ask if you are well, Steve, but know that you have my friendship in this dark time. If I can aid you I will,” he said, his voice deep but surprisingly soft.

Steve didn’t have it in him to give much of an answer to a declaration like that. “Yeah,” he muttered, stepping over to the counter to grab some coffee for himself.

Thor accepted this with a nod. “As I was telling our comrades, Heimdall saw from afar the preparations being made to mourn our lost friend. The reforged bifrost is still weak, and the Tesseract ought not be used overmuch, but the bridge will hold for the rare lone traveller. I would not dishonour so mighty a comrade with my absence.”

“But he couldn’t see what happened,” Fury stated – for Steve’s benefit, it seemed, as everyone else seemed to know this already. Or the three SHIELD operatives were just being their usual inscrutable selves.

“Sorry, who is... Heimdall?” Steve asked.

“He is the guardian of the bifrost, and charged with keeping watch over the Nine Realms. His sight is of such clarity that even the All-Father attempts to keep no secrets from him. But this Tower is hidden from Heimdall’s gaze.” Thor hesitated, and then went on, “He said it was not unlike the spells that my brother wove to shield himself from view. Although I had not thought your science advanced enough to duplicate such effects, Tony struck me as one brilliant beyond his time, much like the good Dr. Banner; if any mortal were so capable, it would be he.”

“How long has it been hidden?” Fury asked.

“I know not for certain, but from Heimdall’s words I would think it several months at least.”

Steve knew what the others were thinking. The program that Tony had left behind had been distrustful of aliens – of Asgard. That could just have been paranoia – of which, Steve knew, Tony had more than a healthy dose – but Thor’s words meant the ‘shielding’ that the program had mentioned was real: Tony had apparently invented an entirely new, advanced, on-par-with-alien technology in order to keep his secrets. Secrets which he had then destroyed...

Fury turned to Clint. “I want Banner back here and looking into this ASAP,” he ordered, getting a nod Clint and an unblinking stare from Natasha. Steve was pretty sure he knew why: the Hulk unsettled Natasha, but she’d had months to deal with it, and she had. Unsettled didn’t mean she couldn’t do her job. But Fury was already turning to her next. “You, I need to stay on SI. We need to know what Stark was up to.” She nodded, and although nothing changed in her expression, Steve knew she was appeased.

Clint saluted the Director – sort of – with his mug of coffee, and ambled over to the elevator. He clapped Thor, and then Steve, on the shoulder as he passed.

“You can understand why we’d have some concerns about Heimdall’s sight,” Fury said bluntly, turning back to Thor, who nodded gravely.

“We are your allies,” he said sombrely, “but the last time your world reaped any benefit from our presence was a millennium ago. Any aid I can grant is small recompense for my brother’s actions, and while the bifrost is yet unready we cannot pay proper wergild. Nor is the funeral of a comrade-in-arms a fit time to speak of treaties and negotiations. Nonetheless, if there is anything I can do...” he left the offer open-ended.

Natasha and the director exchanged glances – glances filled with meaning and suspicion. Eventually, Natasha said to Thor, in the manner of one acquiescing to a superior’s will, “The funeral tomorrow. It would be good to have you there, as a pallbearer.”

Thor nodded. “I do not know what this pallbearer is, but if you will instruct me in the duties expected of me, I will carry them out with honour.”

“It’s not hard. I’ll go over the details with you tomorrow morning. For now – ” she looked at Fury. “Was there anything else, sir?”

“Nothing you need to be involved in, agent,” Fury dismissed her, and then Steve, with a bland, “Captain. Thor, I’ve got scientists who have a lot of questions about Asgard. You answered some of them the last time you were here, but if you’ve got more time now...”

“I will answer your questions to the best of my abilities,” Thor said, “but it is disrespectful to think about this now, while our comrade has not yet been sent to his final rest. I would instead see my lady Jane. After the death of brothers it is important to celebrate what bonds are left.”

Fury, strangely, let it go. “She has a SHIELD guard on her, though she doesn’t know it. You know where she is?” Thor nodded. “Then happy flying.”

Thor looked at each of them. “I will take my leave. Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, Director Fury. I will see you again, tomorrow morning.” He turned and strode out onto the deck – which, Steve now noticed, as the exterior lights came on again, had a strange glyphic pattern burned into the concrete. A second passed as Thor whirled his hammer, faster and faster, and then he was gone, vanishing quickly into the stormy sky.

Fury’s hand went up to his ear as soon as Thor was out of sight, activating his headset. “Hill, I want all personnel working on class-6 or higher projects transferred to Stark Tower. I don’t care what you have to do to get agreement from Potts. No, I’ll explain why once you’re here. Bring a full bug sweep team – I know we already checked, but it’s Stark.”

“Are you going to get some sleep?” Natasha asked Steve, after a glance at the Director. Steve shook his head. “You might want to keep to our common level, or your own – stay out of the way of the incoming circus. I have a meeting at five. Keep me in the loop with what you find.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, but she was already heading toward the elevator.

Fury had finished barking orders and now turned to Steve, an appraising look in his eye. “Keeping busy, Captain?”

“Yes, sir,” Steve murmured. Fury was, among other things, a good man. But occasionally those other things got in the way. His deal weighed heavily on Steve, at a time when he already felt like he might collapse. But he’d only promised to _consider_ Fury’s words, so far...

“Spending more time in the gym than you have been in months. Late at night, at least.”

“Yes, sir. Was there anything else, sir?”

For a moment, he thought that the director was going to insist, but instead Fury just nodded slowly. “I thought you might like to know that my techs have told me that the armours are completely inoperable – and likely irreparable. Seems like the Skynet Protocol fried all of the internal wiring.”

Steve winced. _Jesus_. How damn paranoid had Tony been?

Fury was studying him. Did he want an answer to his earlier request? But the Director didn’t say anything further after a moment, so Steve nodded. “Sir.”

Then he headed for the elevator. He wanted to go hit something.

 

 

 

 

His fist pounded into the bag. The brown Kevlar was dull, plain; no target painted on this bag. No memories overlaid it; no faces of the dead, or of the living.

After the Chitauri invasion, after they’d won, he’d started sleeping better, moving on. Of course, the road trip had sort of necessitated that – there weren’t many gyms open twenty-four hours a day in small towns. He’d taken to running when he couldn’t sleep, instead, jogging around the perimeter of whatever town he was in.

After he’d come back, and moved into the Tower, he’d gone back to spending more time in the gym with the punching bag instead of running. He hadn’t been alone – he’d been aware that he was hardly the only insomniac – but trying to intrude upon others in the wee hours of the morning took more strength than he could muster, late at night, when the War loomed too far forward in his mind.

It had gone on like that for nearly a month, until one night Tony wandered down to Steve’s private gym, drink in hand, at around 3am when neither of them could sleep. Steve had been deep into a rhythm with the bag, his surroundings fading away, when Tony had blithely asked, “Picturing _mein fuhrer’s_ face on there?”

“What?” Steve had halted his routine long enough to pay attention. Tony Stark, he had learned, was far less social than he seemed at first glance. Oh, he liked people – put him in a group of people and he’d immediately make himself the centre of attention – but in that first month Steve had seen Tony less than half a dozen times, because the man was always working – _actually_ working, in his lab. Or at least whenever Steve wandered by there it sure looked like work. “No. I, uh – no.”

“The Red Skull, then?” Tony had suggested, settling himself on a bench and making Steve the object of his full attention. It had felt a little intimidating, actually.

“ _No,_ ” Steve had snapped, and then regretted it when Tony had just raised an eyebrow. “No. I don’t like – hurting people. It’s just... exercise.”

“Mm,” Tony had hummed, with that same short, pretending-to-think tone that he’d had right before he’d insulted Steve’s uniform back on the Helicarrier. But then he had seemed to change his mind. “You know,” he’d said, “or – well, no, you don’t know this, nobody knows this except me and JARVIS and JARVIS doesn’t tattle, do you, JARVIS – ”

_“Only to Ms. Potts, sir.”_

“ – because he’s the best – oh, really? She’s seduced my AI away from me, that woman, I knew I’d be paying for that comment about 12% - ”

_“I assure you, sir, she had won my heart long before.”_

“ – well, damn,” Tony had sworn cheerfully, while Steve had just looked on in bemusement. “But my point was – I mean, after I gave up the whole weapons business, became Iron Man, sorted all of that out – and it did take a lot of... sorting, paperwork, ugh,” he’d made a face, “after all that, when I had more time, occasionally, and found myself wandering around at night, I’d, uh. Design weapons.”

Steve had blinked at him. Tony, in return, had taken a sip of his drink, but he’d looked... discomfited. As if it were some sort of confession. Which, Steve had realized belatedly, it was.

“Big weapons, small weapons – guidance systems – oh, I finally took the time to figure out a proper, workable rail-gun – world-ending weapons – I have, on my servers, twenty...” he’d squinted at his glass of scotch, “...three entirely unique ways to end the world – not that humanity needs any help with that,” he’d finished wryly.

Steve, sweat drying on his skin, his mind muddled from so many nights without too little sleep, had gaped at him. “Why?”

“Because I’m good at it,” Tony had said baldly. “The best, in fact. And it’s what I’ve been doing my entire life.” He’d stood, then, and pointed at Steve with his glass. “You’re not a soldier any more. You could go to school – art school, I’ve seen your portfolio. But when you can’t sleep, you don’t draw, you come down here and... you don’t lift weights, you don’t run – or, well, it’s not your first choice. You come down here and hit things.”

“It’s just a bag,” Steve had said, but he’d found himself unable to look at it, like maybe if he did, he wouldn’t see brown Kevlar.

“And they’re just designs,” Tony had returned, before swallowing the rest of his scotch in one gulp. “Come on, Stevie Wonder, I’ve got way more interesting things in my lab these days. Let me wow you with science.”

After that, when he couldn’t sleep, Steve found himself – occasionally, at first, and then more often when it became apparent that he wasn’t unwelcome – wandering down to Tony’s lab instead of the gym. Tony was always up, no matter the hour – Steve had worried over how little sleep he seemed to get, until JARVIS started reassuring him with daily counts of hours slept, and then he still worried but not quite as much. More often than not Tony didn’t bother to even try explaining what he was working on to Steve, but that didn’t matter; Steve mostly just sat and sketched in the light of the holograms, and it was... good.

It was yet another thing that he’d never get to do again.

 

 

 

 

SHIELD was quick and thorough about ensconcing itself in Stark Tower, taking over the secondary training facilities before dawn and kicking out two floors of SI scientists, besides. Freshly showered and dressed in clean clothes, Steve watched the gaggle of agents carrying in equipment and setting up computers. Cords lay everywhere, presenting a tripping hazard that no one had yet bothered to do anything about.

“You think this EM shielding is the only reason Tony was paranoid about you bringing in SHIELD, sir?” Steve asked Fury quietly. The director was supervising the move with a scowl.

“Of course I don’t,” Fury replied. “But a trap won’t catch anything without bait.”

“Right,” Steve muttered, turning away and heading back to the elevator. JARVIS started taking it up to the Avengers’ common floor without Steve having to ask. His body was finally starting to weary, but his mind kept whirling, kept thinking whenever he tried to blank things out.

 _“I have finished reconstructing the data available from the drives that Agent Barton’s hired technicians repaired and cleaned,”_ JARVIS announced as Steve stepped out and headed toward the kitchen. _“I believe that you may wish to review this information with the others.”_

“Sure, throw it up – uh, if Natasha’s awake,” he added belatedly. Steve wasn’t sure if she’d gone back to bed after their 3am wakeup call – but she’d said she had that early meeting.

 _“I’m here,”_ her voice came over the speaker – JARVIS had hooked her in from wherever she was, then. _“Give me a moment to get to a secure location.”_

 _“About time you guys called,”_ Clint said, also on speaker, as Steve took a seat at the table. The data that he’d been staring at last night – or, well, a few hours ago – popped up in front of him, exactly as it had been when he’d left it. _“Trans-continental flights are the worst.”_

 _“Imagine if you didn’t have a super-sonic jet,”_ Natasha teased – well, it passed as teasing from her, anyway – before turning back to all business. _“Alright, go.”_

 _“Unfortunately, I estimate that approximately 98.8% of the data from Mr. Stark’s private servers, including my own servers, was fully lost to the Skynet Protocol, and most of the reconstructed data is incomprehensible,”_ JARVIS reported in clinical tones. _“I will continue to attempt to find out what the fragments pertain to, but for now, I have found few intelligible items, although I have uploaded the others to your phones for your perusal. Several hours’ worth of fragmented video was also recovered, which I have uploaded as well, although most of it appears to be meaningless to me. I believe it would be in your best interests to watch the exceptions now.”_

 _“Play it,”_ Natasha ordered.

The screen went black, and then abruptly they were looking at a human arm, one with a two-inch-long, deep cut down the side, a second shallower cut beside it, and a third, more like a scratch than a real cut, right beside that. They were not quite perfectly parallel to each other. A finger, calloused and oil-stained, prodded about them, pulling at the flesh so that the deeper wound gaped open. _“ – three shows no sign of – ”_ Tony’s voice said, cutting out as abruptly as the video cut in. The timestamp had been for four days after the Chitauri invasion.

“Damnit,” Steve said softly.

Natasha was frowning; Steve could hear it in her voice when she spoke. _“That should have left a scar. JARVIS, send a message to the morgue techs for me. Order them to check again – check_ everything _again. There was nothing in their report about this and I want to be sure they didn’t miss anything else.”_

Steve closed his eyes. The brief soundbyte of Tony’s voice was – he sounded so _clinical_ about it. Like it was just another one of his damn experiments, like he wasn’t pulling his own arm open. That first cut had been _deep_. What had given it to him? _Who_ had given it to him? The most likely answer, given the depths and positions, made him feel even sicker. 

 _“Message sent,”_ JARVIS said. _“Shall I play the other fragment?”_

At Natasha’s affirmation, the screen flickered. Mostly it was black and grey static, but in the top right corner Steve thought he could make out something moving, although he wasn’t sure what. _“ – fault,”_ said Tony’s voice.

 _“Sir – ”_ replied the JARVIS in the recording, but his voice was distorted, deepened and filled with static, which grew to the point that no other words could be made out for a few seconds.

By the time the recording cleared up again, it had switched back to Tony. _“ – trust anybody...”_ the audio faded again, then recovered, _“...watching. They’ll have eyes on...”_ the recording halted.

 _“More evidence of paranoia, but that doesn’t give us much new,”_ Clint observed. _“You’ve got no record of this?”_

 _“No,”_ said JARVIS shortly. Steve winced in sympathy. He tried to imagine what it would be like, finding out that he’d had months of your memory stripped away, and then watching himself saying things that he couldn’t recall, doing things that he couldn’t recall... it would be enough to give him an entirely new set of nightmares. Did JARVIS have anything equivalent to sleep? Steve resolved to ask at some better time.

 _“What was the non-video data?”_ Natasha.

Schematics popped up. In some places they looked incomplete – it wasn’t as if parts of them were missing, so much as if they were only sketched out, the details not filled in. But it was enough for Steve to see that they were looking at parts of the armour. Data scrolled alongside them, filled with scientific terms that made no sense to Steve. _“These appear to be schematics designed to take best advantage of a new tri-layer outer shell, some of the properties of which are given as shown. The aim appears to be to resist certain broad combinations of radiation, although for what purpose, I am uncertain. The filename was titled Project: Tannhauser.”_

“Tannhauser.” Steve tapped his fingers on the table. The name sounded familiar – why?

 _“As in Tannhauser Gate?”_ asked Clint skeptically. _“Blade Runner?”_

_“Quite so, Agent Barton. It is a not-uncommon reference within science fiction circles.”_

Tannhauser Gate... now Steve remembered. There had been a character, half machine, dying in the rain... _Time to die,_ he’d said.

 _“If it’s related to radiation then we need Bruce to look at it,”_ Natasha interrupted Steve’s thoughts before they could get even more maudlin.

 _“I’ll let the doc know when I find him,”_ Clint agreed. _“I’ll be landing in a few.”_

 _“It may be harder than you expect,”_ Natasha warned. _“He plays professional hide and seek.”_

_“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get him. Barton out.”_

_“Steve,”_ Natasha turned her attention to him instead, _“You did good work yesterday – I want you to keep on it.”_ There was a pause, and slight background noise, like she was fumbling with her phone. _“I need to get back to the meeting. Everyone involved is lawyered up – I don’t think_ anyone _is happy with the original Will, even Pepper, and she’s the one who’s been left everything.”_

“I thought you said the Will was clear,” Steve said, confused. If it was clear, then didn’t they have to follow it?

 _“It’s exceedingly clear. It’s also worth an exceedingly large amount of money. Tony’s got a pissant little cousin, a complete deadbeat, who’s managed to find himself some lawyers and claim that it was done under duress, that as the last living Stark, he should be entitled to the share, that it should be overruled because Pepper is also named as the executor...”_ Natasha sounded frustrated about it, and sour, and Steve felt the sudden urge to punch whoever Tony’s cousin was, without even needing to meet the man. Tony was dead, and there was so much they didn’t know, and this guy was wasting their time out of greed. If the guy had actually cared at all, Natasha wouldn’t have been so harsh – but this had to be making things even harder for Pepper.

“Give him hell for me,” Steve said, and he heard a vicious smile in her voice when she replied, _“Will do,”_ before hanging up.

 

 

 

From his investigations into the structure of HR, Steve branched out. Whatever had been happening had been happening since the Chitauri invasion – JARVIS had determined that all the fake profiles had been created up in the last six months, the shielding had gone up in the last six months... maybe it had started before then, but the signs they had currently didn’t point to that. He looked at transfers, new hirings, firings, where people had been moved and why – Natasha had said that Tony likely needed help on this project, so where was it coming from?

It was slower going than yesterday’s work, though, because whereas before he’d been looking for general patterns in position, wage, and hiring date, now he was trying to look at what sort of _skills_ were being moved around, in fields where he had an extremely limited amount of understanding about what was equivalent, complementary, or completely unrelated. So it was almost a relief when JARVIS interrupted him with a polite, _“Phone call for you from Agent Barton.”_

“Put him on,” Steve said immediately.

 _“Hey kids,”_ Clint’s voice said, faux-chipper. _“Guess who I found?”_

“Bruce is there with you?” Steve asked. “Put him on speaker. Bruce – it’ll be good to have you back home.”

 _“Yeah, I, uh. Wasn’t thinking very clearly when I left. Sorry,”_ Bruce mumbled from somewhere in the background. _“Clint gave me that data that you guys pulled, I’ve been taking a look at it. I got nothing so far, but I’ve only just started...”_

 _“Whatever you can find, we’d appreciate,”_ Natasha said, sounding distracted. Steve started; he hadn’t realized she’d been added to the call. He wondered how the legal meetings were progressing.

 _“I, on the other hand, do have results,”_ Clint said smugly.

“You’ve spent the last couple of hours flying,” Steve objected. “Tell me you’re paying attention to that.”

_“Huh? Oh, sure. No, before I left I reassigned my recruits to hooking up with conspiracy theorists.”_

_“Taking the long shot?”_ Steve could practically hear Natasha raising an eyebrow.

_“It pays off sometimes. If we go with the theory that Stark snapped up Lu and Parks, then I was thinking, maybe he grabbed other people – people who would have to help him, who had nowhere else to turn. Well, no verification on those two, but we got a couple of others – and can I say, SHIELD seriously needs to start looking at the number of scientists going off the deep end. Profiles, JARVIS.”_

Photographs popped up, clustered within larger boxes. The first on the left showed a pretty woman in a lab coat, grey speckled through her brown hair, staring expressionlessly at the camera. Next to that was a series of booking photographs – this time, the woman was in an orange jumpsuit. Text underneath listed the details of her occupation and incarceration, which Steve skimmed as Clint summarized it for them.

_“Maya Hansen – triple doctorate in nanoelectrical engineering, computer programming, and neuroscience. She was head of the Extremis Project – one of those pie-in-the-sky, melding-humans-and-technology research groups. Seven years ago her funding was in danger of getting cut due to lack of results, and she tested the project’s nanoparticles out by injecting them into a couple of homeless guys, who all died horribly. Apparently she kept working on it while she was in Ryker’s, though, right up until six months ago, when she got parole for good behaviour. Which is kinda odd, since the prosecuting lawyer has been insisting lately that she wasn’t supposed to be eligible for parole for at least a decade, but all the paperwork said it was fine. She got out... and vanished the next day. There was a warrant out for her arrest for a few days, until that mysteriously went away, too.”_

_“I remember Dr. Hansen,”_ Bruce said, his voice a mix of admiring and horrified. _“She was in a similar line of work.”_

Steve was taken aback. “The super soldier serum?”

 _“No, she’d given up on the idea of a biochemical serum – she went with a nano-biomechanical mix. The extremis enhancile was supposed to be a twenty-first century solution to the super soldier problem – or that’s what she called it, anyway. It was really far-out-there science, a tonne of computer engineering – same results as what we were looking for, but not the same approach at all. Really – ”_ Bruce broke off, and audibly swallowed. _“It... would have been Tony’s area of expertise, more than mine.”_

The pause after that was heavy with meaning. Means, motive, and opportunity – what potential had Tony seen in Hansen’s work?

 _“Take another look at her work anyway,”_ Natasha said, when the silence got to be too much. Her voice was unusually gentle. _“It may not be your field of expertise, but you have a far better chance of understanding it than any of us.”_

 _“Right, I’ll... add it to the list,”_ Bruce muttered dryly.

There was another pause, and then Clint jumped in, only a tad awkwardly. _“Hansen popped brightest, but she’s not the only scientist gone missing – she’s not even the only one missing who worked on extremis. Next guy on the list is Tem Borjigin – ex-pat from Vietnam who moved to Beijing two decades ago and got himself triple doctorates in computer engineering, mechanical engineering, and philosophy. Three years after Hansen got herself thrown in jail, he started corresponding with her – and a job review from the last quarter says that he was in danger of losing his job because he started working on extremis too much. Then three months ago, he vanished completely, and nobody’s seen him since. Left most of his stuff behind, too.”_

 _“Agent Barton, Mr. Borjigin’s background is sending up several flags,”_ JARVIS cut in. _“While I do not believe his most recent job history was fabricated, it appears likely that his past before that time is something other than it seems.”_

 _“If you found it that fast, then Tony must’ve, too,”_ Clint said.

 _“Indeed. The false background looks to be his work. Very shoddy – I suspect deliberately.”_ What did _that_ mean?

“What was his most recent job?” Steve asked, frowning.

_“Assistant director for the Makluan Group, a small international research collective looking into using biomechanical nanomachines to repair telomeres.”_

_“They were looking for the secret to immortality,”_ Bruce said, with an air of dawning revelation. _“Telomeres – they’re why people eventually die of old age, why human cells break down in the end no matter what.”_ He paused. _“I’m seeing a pattern here that I’m not sure I like.”_

 _“Yeah, well, you’re gonna hate the rest of this, then, doc,”_ Clint said. _“After Borjigin we got Gina Dyson – she’s got a doctorate in mechanical engineering and was an army lieutenant assigned to Project: Ultra-tech, which was what Extremis turned into after Hansen got arrested and they lost all their funding. Her superior officer got mangled up during a live-fire exercise, she tried to use the cybernetics they’d come up with to save his life... it didn’t go so well. She got everything in the book thrown at her, and a long stay in Leavenworth – but she’d only served two years of that before she was remanded into civilian prison five months ago – and nobody knows where she actually ended up. She’s just gone.”_

“People search for immortality a lot these days?” Steve asked, but he didn’t quite manage to make it come out as a joke. What this what Tony’s hologram had been talking about?

 _“It’s always been an interest,”_ Natasha said coolly. She still sounded distracted. Was she trying to pay attention to legal meetings at the same time? Well, she knew her own abilities.

 _“I’m not sure anyone outside of the true believers takes it seriously, but there’s always been those willing to look,”_ said Bruce, sounding uncomfortable. _“And every so often they get something that makes them keep their hopes up.”_ That just sounded bitter. Steve sympathized. 

_”Well, hey, sometimes they’re useful. Like this next guy - Gregor Shapanka, he’s, uh, familiar to SHIELD. Got himself thrown in prison in Hungary back in ’99 when his attempted live demonstration of cryogenics went really, really wrong – he claimed it was an accident that the volunteer got killed, but that just meant he was charged with manslaughter instead of murder. He claimed to have figured it out years later, but of course nobody was going to trust the guy again... SHIELD thought his science was sound, though, they used a lot of it to get you thawed out without brain damage, Steve. Or too much brain damage, anyway.”_

Steve let a flat silence be his reply. After a moment, Clint coughed, and continued, _“Uh. Anyway, he’s like the rest – two weeks after the Chitauri invasion, paperwork got filed, he was supposed to be transferred – and he’s gone, and nobody seems to interested in looking for him.”_

“Greased palms?”

_“Money smoothes over a lot of problems.”_

“Great. Anyone else?”

_“One other guy – he fits the disappearances, but he’s got nothing to do with human enhancement or immortality. Alex Nevsky, he’s a Russian scientist, doctorate in materials engineering, been in and out of prisons there his whole life – mostly for anti-government stunts. Five years ago he got himself in deeper than usual trouble with a series of bomb threats. Four months ago, he vanished from the system. I’d make fun of how easy it is to lose a prisoner with Russian bureaucracy to help you out, but it doesn’t seem like we’re doing any better, so. It could just be the Russians, or it could be another point in our pattern.”_

“So we’ve got five missing scientists, and four of them are criminals?” Steve shook his head. “You’re right. SHIELD should have caught this.”

 _“Yeah, well, hate to say it, but SHIELD palms get greased just as well as anybody else’s,”_ Clint said grimly. _“I wonder if we’d find all these guys if I asked Fury to set SHIELD techs to looking.”_

 _“Do it,”_ Natasha ordered.

Steve nodded. It would make a decent test. “The hologram he left behind – he said he had ‘all the immortality he could handle’,” Steve quoted. “Is that... I mean, it was in his file, how much he wanted to leave behind a legacy, but – ”

 _“He_ has _a legacy – the arc reactor. Why would he suddenly start searching for_ actual _immortality?”_ Bruce asked. He sounded weary, like it was a rhetorical question that it pained him to need to ask.

 _“Well, he did just meet a couple of immortal aliens,”_ Clint pointed out.

 _“He’s been going grey,”_ Natasha said quietly. Getting grey hairs, slowing down – but he had the suit to compensate for that in combat. Outside of the suit…

None of them wanted to say it, not with Bruce on the line – until finally Bruce said it himself. _“Immortality’s not the only tie between these projects. It’s human enhancement.”_ He sounded calm – too calm. _“He’s been looking into human enhancement.”_ While Bruce had been working in a lab only a few floors away.

Silence hung over all of them.

 _“We’ll see what else we can dig up from the conspiracy theories,”_ Clint said finally. _“Maybe if we can track down one of these missing scientists, we’ll get an idea what Tony was really up to.”_

“Yeah, maybe,” Steve agreed, but he wasn’t so sure. Tony had rarely played nicely even with SI’s R&D department – would he have played any nicer with scientists that he had sprung from prison? Still, anything those scientists knew would be more they did at the moment.

 _“We’ll be at the Tower in about an hour,”_ Clint reported.

 _“Alright. I’ve got to go. Bye,”_ Natasha said abruptly.

 _“Is she okay?”_ Bruce asked, concerned.

 _“Agent Romanoff is participating in legal meetings with the board of directors, who are currently concerned about many of the patent rights included in the estate,”_ JARVIS said, sounding displeased.

 _“Ahh, lawyers,”_ Clint said sagely. _“No wonder she’s grumpy.”_

_“Indeed.”_

“Hey, your techs figure out where Tony was sending those messages – from that outside-only computer you said he had?” Steve asked. Maybe if he had an idea about where he should be looking geographically...

_“Not yet. Apparently there’re just too many trails.”_

_“I have been endeavouring to shed some light on the matter,”_ JARVIS cut in, _“but unfortunately I fear that this time Mr. Stark has managed to outwit me.”_

“Join the club,” Steve muttered.

Clint barked a laugh over the comm. There wasn’t very much humour in it. _“Cheer up, Cap, we’ve only been at this for two days. If we managed to unravel all the mysteries of Tony Stark that quickly, he’d be rolling over in his grave in shame.”_ There was a pause. _“Except that we haven’t buried him yet.”_

In the background, Bruce mumbled, _“And people say_ my _sense of humour is terrible.”_

Steve felt slightly sick. He got it, he did – Clint was a professional sniper, and he’d served his time as a soldier. But trying to joke about a friend’s death... “Right. See you when you get here,” he said, and cut the connection before he could say anything that he’d later regret.

 

 

 

Skills, transfers, new hires. Had there been more changeover in the Delhi division than was normal? What constituted ‘normal’ for SI, a company employing hundreds of thousands of workers that had reinvented itself in only a few years? Of course, the more Steve looked, the more he found that the makeover was really just that – a makeover, changing only the surface. Stark Industries had always had massive secondary projects, and although none of them had been larger than the weapons division before Tony’s change of heart, all of them put together had been.

 _“Captain, Dr. Banner and Agent Barton have arrived,”_ JARVIS announced.

Steve wasn’t in the mood to greet them. There was something – something in the shift of workers, the movement – JARVIS created spreadsheets for him, which he poured over until his eyeballs ached and his stomach growled and then finally he had to call it quits. On his way to the kitchen, though, he suddenly paused the elevator, surprising himself. “JARVIS,” he said, and hesitated again before finally saying, “Uh. The lab.”

JARVIS didn’t reply aloud. The doors opened almost silently on the correct floor, and Steve stepped out, feeling a sudden wash of trepidation. The last time he’d been here...

The lights in Tony’s lab were on.

Steve bit down a wave of anger. If Fury had set up shop here again – but he stepped through the doors and found no SHIELD agents lurking about. The mess was largely still as it had been, although DUM-E and U had been moved, and were now sitting in the middle of the room. Somebody had righted DUM-E, but U was still mostly in pieces, even if they were more carefully laid out than they had been before. Bruce was standing beside them, with one hand on DUM-E’s single arm.

 _“Captain,”_ JARVIS said quietly – not for Steve’s benefit, but for Bruce’s. The doc looked up at once.

“I, uh, convinced Clint to have his techs hand them back over,” Bruce said awkwardly. “They’d finished looking them over for... footage, bugs, anything. But their motherboards, hard drives... Tony knew what he was aiming at.”

 _“Although they themselves were not keyed in to the Skynet Protocol, all backups of their programs were,”_ JARVIS said softly. _“Even if Mr. Stark were here, there is nothing that could be done.”_

“Oh,” said Steve, feeling numbed by this new announcement. He’d thought they could just be repaired, rebooted, like JARVIS had been – maybe with a bit more effort, because U would have to be put back together somehow, but he’d thought... they would be okay. Clint had said Tony had killed his kids, but somehow Steve hadn’t realized – they were _gone,_ just as surely as any human.

Gone, killed by Tony before Steve had seen him, before he’d let Tony do the same and go blow off his own head. It didn’t make any sense, none of it – the fear in Tony’s eyes on the recording they’d retrieved from DUM-E, the way he’d panicked... Tony didn’t often show affection directly – he teased, he pulled pigtails, and he’d go behind your back and make your dreams come true – but Steve knew love when he saw it, and Tony had loved his robots – and they’d loved him back. Steve had drawn them all, many times, he’d _seen_ it.

That first time that Tony had invited him into his lab, Steve had been nearly bowled over by all the light and colour, playing together in wondrous combinations; he hadn’t realized he’d been standing there, staring open-mouthed at the holograms, until Tony had realized Steve was no longer following him and come back to collect him.

“Don’t stop at the door, you’ll let the science out,” he’d said, smiling, and as Steve had trailed after him, he’d felt a bit like he was following the Pied Piper of Hamlin. “Just watch your step – no, dummy, go away, you’re useless, I’m not falling for that again, that’s probably poison – ”

Steve had bristled, mostly out of confusion for the sudden insults, but then he realized that, as distracted as he had been by the holograms floating in the dimly-lit room, he hadn’t noticed the _robots_ – two of them, one holding a camera – it bobbed its arm at Steve, who after a moment waved at it awkwardly – and one pressed up against Tony, holding out a glass containing something disgustingly green-grey.

Tony had glanced back over his shoulder. “Right. Steve, meet DUM-E  – most useless thing in this room, keeps trying to kill me, I swear to god – and that one over there is U - no, I’m not taking it, you know you’re not allowed to mix drinks without JARVIS’ supervision – ”

But for all that he’d been berating the robot, one hand had settled upon the mechanical arm fondly, like a father’s hand on his son’s shoulder.

The gripping mechanism on the end of the arm had been blown off by repulsor fire; now it ended in a lump of half-melted metal. “I’m sorry,” Steve said, but it seemed such a useless thing to say.

Bruce patted DUM-E’s arm and stepped away, still staring sadly at the mechanical remains. It abruptly occurred to Steve that the look on his face had, perhaps, too much sympathy mingled with grief – Bruce wasn’t here, in the largest part, for himself. Which meant... he was here for JARVIS, to mourn with him – to grieve for his fallen older brothers, whom everybody else had overlooked.

Rage and guilt and grief itched under Steve’s skin, but he made himself stand there, keeping vigil with Bruce, until JARVIS roused himself from silence and announced that Natasha wanted to know if Bruce had made any progress.

“No,” Bruce scrubbed at his face with one hand. “Sorry. I’m still doing a lot of background research, a lot of it... really isn’t my field.” He sighed. “And a lot of it is just useless. I could use some lunch.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed, and he accompanied Bruce upstairs.

 

 

 

After lunch and a few hours at the gym, he got back to work, comparing SI with other companies in a variety of fields. Where were they moving workers? How much was normal? What were SI’s stated policies? By the time evening rolled around, he had begun to form some vague suspicions, and when he presented his findings to Natasha, she concurred.

“JARVIS and I have been tracing the flow of money from those fake profiles you found earlier, and he was dealing in way more than SHIELD suspected.” She shook her head. “We knew that he was playing the stock market – or having JARVIS do it – but he had accounts under other names, too, which we’d never have found if we hadn’t gotten clued in to those profiles. A lot of money flowing into SI’s Chinese facilities, off the books.”

“Does Pepper know?”

“She does now.” Natasha grimaced. “She had no idea before I asked. It... upset her.”

“We need to go to China, then. Shenzhen,” he was pretty sure he hadn’t quite managed the pronunciation on that one. “We need to find out what he was hiding there.”

“We need to go to the funeral. We can leave after. When was the last time you slept?” The bluntness of Natasha’s tone made the abrupt change in topic easier to accept.

“I’ll be fine.”

“You’re going to crash,” Natasha contradicted him. “Do you want that to happen at Tony’s funeral, while half the world’s watching you?”

Steve looked away, down at the smart table, tracing aimless patterns on it. Small whirls of coloured light followed his fingertips, even though he hadn’t activated the table – JARVIS, reaching out, in his own way.

“Steve,” Natasha said, her voice low and rough. “I know.” Steve didn’t have to look at her to know the truth of that. “But you need sleep. So do I.” There was humour in that last statement, bitter like the darkest kind of chocolate.

“If I sleep, I’ll...” Steve didn’t know what – what he would do, what would happen. In dreams the ice froze around him still – would he be doomed to forever finding Tony’s corpse on the floor, sans a head? Or would it be like the darker nightmares, the ones that he sometimes couldn’t tell from waking, where every person he glanced away from died and he was forever in a world made of strangers? He had nightmares of HYDRA and explosions and bombs going off – perfectly normal for someone with his history, Leo told him – but he had other ones, too, where he was the monster and he woke up screaming, covered in blood.

He’d killed Tony. He’d looked away and Tony had died. It was his fault.

“Meds?” Natasha asked. There was no judgement in her voice – of course, there wouldn’t be. She took meds herself, if infrequently. And Steve wouldn’t hold it against anyone who did, but...

“They flush out too fast.” Medicine in general was something he was personally leery of – the serum had jacked up his metabolism in some ways and slowed it down in others, and the end result was that doctors generally had no idea how much of a drug he needed to get the same effect – usually far more than any unenhanced human – or what would be an overdose. Trying to find out was exhausting, and made him feel like a lab rat, even when it was just basic pain meds – which, in retrospect, he was pretty glad the SSR had insisted on. SHIELD hadn’t asked him to undergo any further tests beyond those for modern pain medication, and he knew from Leo that psychiatry was an even more difficult field to navigate than most. The thought of playing lab rat for long enough to find something... better to stay up for days and spend too much time in the gym.

Natasha nodded once, acknowledging his points and all the things he hadn’t said. “Somebody else?” When Steve looked at her in confusion, she offered with a faint smile, “It helps to know you’re not alone, sometimes.”

Steve shook his head. “I...” He was used to waking, frequently, and wandering the Tower. Bruce was never up at odd hours – he tried to stick to a regular schedule – but Clint and Natasha sometimes were, curled up in the communal living room with books or television or their heads in one another’s lap, or in the kitchen having dinner at 3am because they’d gotten back late. Tony was _always_ up, working on something or other in his lab, and while he sometimes got grumpy if Steve tried to talk to him, late at night, he always was perfectly content to let Steve sit there with his sketchbook.

“The couch is free now,” Natasha said, tilting her head in that direction. “I’ve got more paperwork than I’d like to have that I need to do here. I’ll stay. Go catch some sleep. I’ll wake you up if you need it.”

Steve looked down. He felt vaguely ashamed, that he needed to be scolded to sleep like a child. That he needed to have someone there to drive away his fears.

“Captain.” The use of his rank, rather than his name, brought his eyes back up to meet Natasha’s. “This isn’t a favour. This isn’t anything owed. It’s what we do for each other. Do you think Clint or I never have difficulty sleeping?”

He knew they had. He was just – being stupid. Stupid and tired. He offered a faint smile of his own in return and nodded, standing to go over and flop on the couch. Its cushions were too soft to make for a good bed – Steve preferred a harder mattress – but they pulled him into it like they always did. He grabbed the afghan off the back of the couch and pulled it over his head, shutting out the world. Hiding from it, and as futile as the effort was, it was enough to let the clack of keys lull him to sleep.

 

_He was standing in front of the bar at the Stock Club, waiting. He wasn’t sure what for, but he knew he had to wait. If he didn’t – if he didn’t –_

_“You’re late, soldier,” said Peggy, and Steve turned to face her. She was wearing a red dress, her hair done up in curls, and her smile full of light. “Too late.”_

_“What?” It took him a moment to realize what she’d said; she was still smiling radiantly. “No – I came – ”_

_“We lost,” came Tony’s voice from behind him, and Steve turned – but the Stork Club was gone, now, and he was staring out at a city of ruins – New York, but it wasn’t the New York he knew. This New York was made of gleaming lines and flickering lights and it lay destroyed, as alien ships swarmed out through a gaping tear in the sky. He whirled back, but Peggy was gone – everything was gone._

_Ice clinked against glass, as Tony raised his scotch in a mocking toast. “Drink to the end of the world, Cap – ”_

 

When Steve woke, it was pitch dark. It took him a moment to realize that this was because he had managed to wrap the afghan almost entirely around his head – he was lucky he hadn’t suffocated himself with it. He felt sweaty and clammy all over, like he’d been running for hours and stopped suddenly without cooling down, but the fragments of his dream were fast fading – even if the fresh wave of guilt that accompanied it remained behind.

He pulled the blanket off of his head and looked around. The interior lights were dimmed, but outside New York was lit up against the bright night sky. Clouds still covered the city, lending everything an orange hue. There was enough light to make out Natasha’s form on the second couch nearby, curled up into a tiny ball. Her breathing was soft and even, almost perfectly silent – no one with unenhanced senses would have heard a thing. Steve wondered if he should stay, return the favour – but even as he wondered, Natasha opened her eyes and sat up.

“Sorry,” Steve apologized.

“It’s fine,” Natasha replied, blinking her eyes and immediately looking alert. “JARVIS, time?”

 _“Five-oh-two AM,”_ JARVIS answered softly. Steve was surprised – he’d slept a full seven hours. Despite himself, he felt better for it – and then he hated himself a little for that.

Natasha nodded and stood, her movements, as always, a beautiful mixture of economy and grace. For months Steve had wanted to draw her in motion, to capture that sense on paper – but he knew he wasn’t good enough, not yet. In the meantime, he practiced.

“I need to be at Stark Industries in an hour,” she told him, walking over to the elevators with light, near-silent steps. The guilt in Steve’s stomach flared again – Natasha should have been able to spend the night in her own bed, not on a couch – no matter how comfortable the couch – because Steve needed babysitting.

Tony’s funeral was in nine hours. Steve wondered if he could spend the entire time running – or if it’d be worth his time to try searching through the data again. It seemed futile, until they could get on the ground in Shēnzhèn.

 _“Captain,”_ JARVIS asked, a hint of hesitation in his smooth tones, _“If you are not adverse... Ms. Potts is in the living room of Mr. Stark’s suite, and I believe she could use your company.”_

Jesus. He’d been so caught up in his own guilt – he’d barely spared a few thoughts for Pepper, how this must feel for her. She’d known Tony longer than anyone, except Rhodey – she’d dated Tony for over a year, before they split up – he should have inquired about her, made sure she was okay, that she had someone. Steve stood, heading for the elevator. “How is she doing?” he asked, as the elevator began to move.

 _“As well as any could expect,”_ JARVIS answered, subdued. The elevator arrived at the floor, but the doors remained closed as JARVIS continued, _“Colonel Rhodes has been keeping her company, but unfortunately he was called away a half hour ago by his superiors. Rumours have been circulating – as they always will, about the presence of anyone so well-known.”_ He sounded disapproving, as he well should be. Steve didn’t want to wonder what the tabloids were making up about Tony’s death, didn’t want to imagine the vultures coming to pick at his corpse and the estate – and empire – he’d left behind.

Steve nodded, but hesitated. “And... how are you?” he asked. In all his talks with JARVIS, he hadn’t outright asked, and now it seemed like a grievous oversight.

 _“I am as well as can be expected,”_ said JARVIS quietly. The doors opened – a not-so-subtle hint. Fair enough.

“Hello?” Pepper called, and Steve stepped into the living room. “Oh,” she said as she saw him. She was wearing silk pyjamas, and Steve’s face reddened, although she was covered from head to toe. In her right hand she held a glass of wine, and the smell of it mingled with her perfume to fill the room – although no one other than Steve would have noticed, not unless they were much closer to her.

“Pepper,” he said softly.

“Jim call you up, or JARVIS?” she asked ruefully. There was an air of misery about her, spelled out in the redness of her eyes and nose, the way her face had gone blotchy from crying. She stepped forward, and Steve took the cue and folded her into a hug. She leaned into him, and he leaned back – not physically, because he knew full well his physical strength, but – he felt a bit better.

After a long moment, they parted. Steve didn’t say anything, but he glanced at the glass in her hand, and she caught the direction of his gaze. “I know, I know,” she gave a watery laugh. “Picking up all his bad habits. But it’s – his – ” she blotted at her eyes with end of one of her silken sleeves. “It’s the funeral, today, and the press – SHIELD has dropped the ball, or _something_ , because there’s all sorts of rumours out there and they’re going to be terrible. We _had_ to have a public funeral, but...” she cast her gaze toward the windows, showing the lights of the city.

“So few people really... knew him,” Steve said softly. He got it, he did. Tony would have revelled in the pomp and circumstance, but at the end of the day he would have hated it, too, with that strange dichotomy that he took toward all things in his public life. Perhaps afterwards, they would have a wake, in private, for just them... but it would have to be after China, after they’d solved the mystery that Tony had left behind. If it could be solved.

“I shouldn’t listen to them, I know – I know better than to look,” Pepper said, taking a sip of wine and stepping toward the windows. “They’re dragging up – everything, from months ago. If it gets out, they’ll all know – ” she buried her face in the hand not holding the glass of wine. “They’ll know I – and he – ”

She was crying, sobs hitching in her breath, and Steve felt useless. He didn’t know what to do. She was talking about the breakup, but he didn’t know what she meant, other than that the press were awful and he’d always known that. Uncertain of whether to step closer or let her have her space, he hovered awkwardly.

“I left him,” she wept, and it had the air of a confession. “I left him – and he – if I’d stayed – ” and now Steve knew what she meant, knew because the thick guilt in her voice matched the sick feeling in his stomach.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, hating how helpless he sounded, how unsure. How empty, because he _knew_ that guilt, wore it himself. It was his, not hers. From somewhere he summoned the assurance he felt when he was in the costume, with the cowl down – when he was something more than himself. “It wasn’t your fault,” he repeated, and this time it didn’t sound fake.

“He’d been alone all his life, and I _left_ him,” she sobbed into her hand, unwilling or unable to look up at him.

He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t – but he knew that Pepper had hugged him, had hugged Bruce, so he stepped forward gingerly and put his arms around her, carefully easing the wine glass from her hand. Without it to hang onto, she curled further inward on herself, and he cradled her to him gently; after a minute, he started rubbing circles onto her back as she cried, hoping that it would be soothing rather than just awkward.

Three months ago, he’d done this for Tony – who had been blind stinking drunk at the time, so far gone that Steve was pretty sure he hadn’t remembered anything of it when he’d finally sobered up afterward. The breakup, as far as Steve knew, had been mutual, but Tony had blamed himself, had sobbed, “‘M gonna die like m’dad, like Howar’, drivin’ everyone away, workin’ al’a’time...”

Steve had had no idea what to say. From SHIELD’s files and the occasional brief remarks that Tony’d made, he’d known that Tony’s relationship with his long-dead father was – strained. So he’d sat and hugged Tony, let him cry on his shoulder, and then when Tony had finally passed out, Steve’d stayed up with him all night to make sure he didn’t drown in his own vomit. And then the next night – until finally, desperate to stop Tony’s precipitous downward spiral, he’d called Rhodey.

The thing was, if Steve had been in Pepper’s place, if he’d been dealing with a partner who’d started keeping the hours that Tony had kept – he might’ve called it quits, too. It wasn’t just Tony being Tony; he’d always kept ridiculous hours, but in the months after the invasion, there’d not been a single day where he hadn’t spent a minimum of twelve hours in his workshop. Steve had kept him company for many of those hours – although nowhere near the majority – but Pepper had her own work; she couldn’t afford to spend hours lounging about in Tony’s lab like Steve had, with nothing better to do than read history books. She loved Tony – this Steve knew, from those occasions when he’d talked to her before – and Tony loved her, but something had _changed_ , after Manhattan had nearly been nuked. Something that maybe they were only now starting to discover....

There was a point where a person couldn’t give anymore, and Pepper had reached that point. Steve could never condemn her for that.

Finally, Pepper’s tears began to slow, and she sniffed, wiping at her eyes again and turning her sleeve damp. Before she could speak, Steve said firmly, a third time, “It wasn’t your fault.” He hastened to say more, before she could protest again. “Tony’s – Tony was an adult. He made his own decisions and none of that is on you. It wasn’t your fault, and he would never want you to think that. You know that.” He wanted to try to meet her eyes, but that was impossible unless he stopped hugging her, and the way she was still semi-shuddering with sobs made him reluctant to push her away before she took that initiative herself. “Come on, you know how – he took all the credit for everything he ever did, he’d never want you to blame yourself.”

“Twelve percent,” she mumbled into his shoulder – an old inside joke between the pair of them that neither of them had ever explained. 

Her shaking finally subsided completely, and she gave a long sigh, muffled by the fabric of his shirt, before lifting her head. Steve stepped back, although he kept her hands on her shoulders for a moment longer, trying to instill some lingering sense of support. Maybe it was futile, but –

“It wasn’t your fault, either, you know,” Pepper told him. She made an aborted movement to scrub at her eyes with her hands again, then walked over to the nearby table and reached for a tissue instead, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose before grabbing another one and repeating the process. It was a good thing that she wasn’t wearing makeup – it would have been ruined.

Unable to answer her, Steve looked away, out at the city. The sky was starting to lighten – the clouds had finally disappeared. Just in time for the funeral, which felt... wrong, but then, it had never rained at any of the funerals that Steve had attended, when it would have been fitting for each and every one to be held in a downpour. But the weather didn’t tie itself to the tragedies of human life.

“Steve,” Pepper returned to join him at the window, “either we share the blame or we’re both absolved.”

What could he say to that? Pepper wasn’t to blame, couldn’t be to blame. “Yeah,” Steve agreed half-heartedly. “I just wish...”

“Me too,” whispered Pepper.

They stood in silence, watching the sky grow gradually lighter, until the lights of the nearby skyscrapers didn’t stand out so much in contrast with the dark. It wasn’t quite dawn, but it was close enough. Steve’s muscles itched – for all that he’d been working himself to exhaustion the past few days, he’d missed his morning run, and he hadn’t run last night before crashing on the couch. He needed a shower, too – but that could happen after the run. And if Pepper was okay. With Rhodey still away, Steve found himself reluctant to leave her alone.

But Pepper made the decision for him. “I need to get ready,” she said, pressing her fingers to her temples. “And I need – an Advil. Drinking and crying is a great recipe for a headache.” She shot him a quick, sad smile. “You don’t need to stay, Steve. I’ll be – I’ll be okay.”

“It’s not – I wouldn’t leave,” Steve said, but she shook her head at him.

“You’re shifting on your feet, restless,” she informed him. “And I do need to – to get dressed.” She looked down at her silk sleeves – one still dark from having been soaked with tears – ruefully. Oh. Right. Steve’s face heated. 

“Um. Just let me get you a glass of water,” he fumbled, stepping back and then quickly going into the kitchen to grab a glass and run the tap. He rummaged around until he found some Advil – his own eyes grew hot, and he had to blink, when he found the vast array of painkillers that Tony kept in the cupboard right next to the wine rack. Pepper hadn’t been entirely wrong – Tony had been one of the loneliest men that Steve had ever met.

“Here,” he said, returning with the water and Advil and presenting them to Pepper. The blotchiness on her face hadn’t faded much, but no doubt she would be putting on more makeup anyway before showing her face in public. She gave him a peck on the cheek, and he took his leave. The pavement outside called to him – he wanted to run without stopping, run until he passed out. But that would take more time than there was left before the funeral, so after changing into running wear, he settled for his usual route.

At half-past eight, when he arrived back at the Tower, jogging more slowly to let his muscles cool down, Steve found the place completely surrounded by reporters. The traffic was snarled up for blocks around, even worse than the usual rush-hour; camera crews crowded the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians to step off of the curb so frequently that an entire lane was out of commission. Somebody had parked a news van illegally, and there was a tow truck driver arguing with a woman in a power-suit about it. Steve set his jaw grimly, and considered leaving and calling for a pickup – but it was too late. One of the reporters had already spotted him, and then they all did.

It was times like this that he sorely regretted ever getting caught on camera without his cowl on. In the age of the internet, it had only taken one lucky person with a camera phone in the wake of the Chitauri invasion, and his secret was blown before he’d even realized he had a secret to keep. Ordinarily he wasn’t bothered too much by the public – but right now, he had a drove of reporters descending upon him _en masse_.

He walked forward briskly. All he had to do was get to the lobby doors, and then the Tower security would take care of them. He felt sweat trickling down the back of his neck, not from the exertion of his run, but from the way they were _screaming_ at him, shouting to be heard, and _what_ they were shouting –

“Captain, can you confirm rumours that – ”

“ - America, look this way, please! This way – ”

“ – New York Times has evidence – ”

“ – do you have a statement about – ”

“ – that Tony Stark’s death was in fact a _suicide_ – ”

They were crowded in front of him, blocking his way, and he couldn’t – Captain America couldn’t be seen pushing reporters over. Tower security had noticed, and was coming to his rescue, but too slowly – there were too many gawkers mixed in among the reporters, the crowds were too thick. He was going to vomit if he didn’t make them all _shut up_.

Steve raised two fingers to his mouth and whistled, piercingly sharp, loud enough to be heard over the clamour. Then he drew himself up, and apparently he managed to convey _something_ , because he managed to get about a good foot of personal space – though he knew it wouldn’t last.

“Get out of my way and I’ll give you a statement,” he ordered tersely, and reluctantly, slowly, the crowd parted. He made it to the top of the steps, and security closed in around him.

There was no one stopping him from walking – or running – into the building, into taking shelter in it. Except for months of training in dealing with modern media, and the thought of loading additional stress onto Pepper’s shoulders. He turned, and took a deep breath. A reporter opened his mouth to start up the barrage again, and Steve held up a hand to pre-emptively silence him.

“This is disgusting,” he said, his voice barely above normal speaking level, forcing them all to remain quiet. Mics were thrust toward him, but the press were still held back by security. Dimly, in the back of his brain, beyond the fury and the grief reignited, he was aware that he was probably going to still be making a problem for Pepper, but it was the best he could do. “Three days ago, a great man died. Tony was a friend, and a hero. He saved countless lives. His death – his death is a tragedy, and you’re standing here on his doorstep, on the morning of his funeral, looking for _gossip?_ ” He glared at them, letting all of his disappointment, all of his grief, show.

It felt _wrong_ , to use grief like that – to use emotion like that – but it was Tony’s own advice. “The best lies aren’t lies at all,” he’d said. “You’re too damn honest to deal with the press, Steve, you’ll get eaten alive if you try to follow PR’s advice. Go with honesty, _show_ them you mean it, just don’t show them... everything.”

Three days after Tony’s death, Steve stared down a horde of reporters and shook his head in disappointment. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” he said, and then he turned and went inside. Security could deal with the crowd. 

Only one reporter had the temerity to shout a question after him: “Does this mean that you’re not denying the Times’ evid-” The door swung shut, and the sound from outside cut off.

Inside the lobby, the scant few SI employees around – all security personnel – stared at him, quickly looking away whenever he glanced in their direction. The lobby felt like it echoed more than normal, without the usual crowd of people coming in and out. The private elevator was waiting, doors open, when he reached it, and as soon as its doors closed on him, shutting him away from the outside world, Steve asked, “JARVIS, what was that – ”

 _“At 8am the New York Times posted a notice on their website claiming one of their reporters had obtained conclusive evidence of a SHIELD-run cover-up about Mr. Stark’s death. They have stated that out of respect, they will withhold publishing until after the funeral.”_ JARVIS’s tone left no doubt about what he felt about _that_. “ _There is currently an operation in progress to determine the origin and full nature of the leak, and destroy as much proof as is possible before publication.”_

“Fury’s overseeing it?” If somebody was leaking details about SHIELD, Fury wouldn’t hand it off to someone else. He might have delegated the investigation into Tony’s death to Clint and Natasha, but a leak – that, he’d be looking into personally.

 _“Indeed,”_ JARVIS intoned, as the elevator doors opened onto one of the levels that SHIELD had taken over. 

Steve was dripping sweat onto the floor, but he ignored the glances he got from SHIELD agents as he searched out Fury, who was looming over a row of techs. “Sir,” said Steve.

“No, we don’t have the leak yet, Captain,” Fury said shortly, without looking at him. The techs in front of them didn’t turn around – the nearest one was staring at him computer and sitting up so straight that Steve rather thought he was in danger of spraining something. “But we will within the hour.”

Steve wasn’t sure if that was what the techs had told Fury, or what Fury had told the techs, but at the end of the day it didn’t really matter. “You’re not going to shut them down?” Not that he was generally in favour of blocking freedom of the press, but SHIELD usually had no such qualms.

“When they’ve already announced to the world that they have it?” Fury snorted. “You want to grab a sign saying ‘we admit it’ and go stand on the top deck?” Steve flushed; of course, it had been a stupid idea. He wasn’t used to dealing with people on his own side being the target. “Techs’ll grab the digital evidence, we’ve got a team about to grab the physical evidence – without proof, they’ve got nothing but rumours. The estate can sue for libel and clear them out in court.”

That sat heavily in Steve’s stomach. The Times ought to have more _tact_ , certainly, but ruining a newspaper for printing the _truth_ was still wrong. He said as much to Fury and got a dismissive wave in return.

“Take it up with Ms. Potts, Captain – that’s her prerogative. Ours is figuring out who dropped the ball.” Steve was standing on Fury’s left, but he could feel the force of the Director’s glare even through the eye-patch. But then, everything about this, even before the security leak, was personal – maybe not as personal as Coulson, but Steve knew that for all Fury antagonized Tony, Fury did respect for him – and not just as an opponent. He might even have liked him. And Tony had left that message for Fury, begging him. _Nick - don’t fuck this up._ Not that Fury needed the additional reminder.

“You told the Council about this yet, sir?” Steve asked softly, pitching his voice so it wouldn’t travel far. Fury’s secrets had secrets, but he was at least interested in the welfare of the human race. The WSC – Steve wasn’t sure what their motives were, other than power and the exercise of it. Steve wouldn’t put it past them to be playing power games about Tony’s death – not after they’d been willing to drop a nuke on New York.

“I find that it’s best to obtain all available facts before presenting them to the Council,” Fury said evenly, which was a lie, because there was no way Fury ever presented anyone with _all_ the facts, but was also a no. So the leak wasn’t from that end – unless it was. Both of the pilots who’d obeyed the order to drop a nuke had been shuffled out of SHIELD with all due haste, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more agents who chafed underneath Fury’s rule. “Are you done sticking your nose in, or do you feel the need to supervise this operation in person, Captain?”

Steve stiffened, but it wasn’t like Fury didn’t have a point. SHIELD had this in hand – or if they didn’t, he’d find out soon enough. “Sir,” he said, and headed off to take a shower.

 

 

 

Research was difficult to concentrate on, with Natasha’s detailed instructions regarding the funeral sitting in his email inbox, and it was with a sick feeling of relief that he finally abandoned it to go get ready. The suit that Natasha had promised to arrange for him was laid out on his bed when he returned to his room; black, with a dark red shirt – a darker variation on Tony’s usual crimson – and a black tie. He wondered if she’d delivered it herself. It felt strange, to be dressing in formal attire that wasn’t military – but SHIELD had no formal dress. When he’d been dealing with the press, he’d worn either his combat suit or his military greens – but the former was far too gaudy for today, and the latter had made him feel uneasy since he’d woken up in this strange new world. The uniform was old and outdated, and he hadn’t been active military for seventy years.

It fit perfectly, of course. SHIELD had all his measurements, even if they outsourced making the actual Captain America suit to Tony. Or had. Now, if he damaged it, they’d have to get their own people on it, or give it to another contractor. The thought of somebody else repairing the suit shouldn’t have made him feel so unbalanced – when he’d first put it on, he hadn’t known Tony, hadn’t trusted him. He shouldn’t distrust that SHIELD would provide him adequate protection. He shouldn’t.

He tied the tie, remembering his mother’s hands over his own, teaching him how. His father had been long gone by that point, but Sarah Rogers had never let that slow her down – not where Steve could see, anyway. Not until TB had taken her. Hers had not been the first funeral that Steve had attended, but it had been the first where he’d been a pallbearer – _Bucky, standing on the other side of him, positioning his arm to support most of Steve’s share of the load, too – the feel of cheap pine under his fingertips_ – really, it was a wonder that the box hadn’t fallen apart before they’d gotten it in the ground, but getting even that much had put him into near-ruinous debt.

Bucky had never had a funeral. A wake, but not a funeral, and there wouldn’t have been a body even if they’d had one. He’d missed the funerals of all the other Commandos save Gabe, and Colonel – by then General – Phillips had been gone long before any of them. Peggy was still lively, even if she was nearing triple digits and her memory was fading, fading so painfully, but if he didn’t get himself killed in some fool stunt first, he’d be attending her funeral, too, in a few years. Or less.

Steve smoothed his tie against his chest, and slipped his phone into the inner jacket pocket. It didn’t show; the suit was perfectly tailored.

It was time.

They assembled in the underground garage. Steve was the second-last there – and to his surprise (although the next moment he mentally kicked himself: it shouldn’t have been a surprise, it had been included in the instructions), James Rhodes was there as well. “Sir,” Steve said automatically, no matter that he wasn’t in the military anymore.

Rhodey hesitated for a moment, almost imperceptibly, before he said, “Steve,” and held out his hand for Steve to shake. Steve wondered if he’d been about to say something else – Captain? Rogers? It felt strange to shake the man’s hand. He wished Rhodey would just _punch_ him, already.

“I am... very sorry,” Steve fumbled. His voice was low enough that the other three men nearby – Clint, Thor, and Bruce – could politely pretend to ignore him and Rhodey.

Rhodey didn’t quite meet his eyes, but his voice was even as he replied, “There wasn’t anything you could do.”

Steve wanted to protest, to admit his guilt – to claim culpability. Natasha had said the same damn thing, Leo had, too, and every time it felt like they were just refusing to see – refusing to admit it, that it had been his fault. That today’s funeral wouldn’t be happening if he had just paused, had waited, had done _something._ Anything.

But Rhodey had enough on his plate; if he didn’t want to condemn Steve, then Steve wasn’t going to force his guilt, his presence, upon him. He swallowed, instead, and nodded greetings to Bruce and Clint. Bruce’s hair was mussed, as it always seemed to be, and Clint had produced a comb from somewhere and was trying to get it into some semblance of neatness; neither of them were paying attention to Steve. Thor nodded back, gravely, looking as strange in a formal suit as Steve felt. He still carried his hammer, at least, and at the sight of it, Steve wished he’d brought his shield. He could have left it in the car, he supposed.

They stood about in awkward silence for about a quarter of an hour before the sound of shoes clicking on concrete announced Happy’s arrival. He took them all in with a glance. “We’re good to go,” he reported.

Rhodey nodded sharply. “Then let’s go. We’re behind schedule already.”

Steve blinked. “Where’s Natasha?” he murmured to Clint as they all moved, out into the larger, SI garage. There was a line of cars set up, leading to the main garage entrance, which was still closed – including a sizable honour guard.

Beside Rhodey, Happy was explaining, “Security mix-up, sir. Morgan Stark was threatening a scene.”

“Bastard.”

Clint was still eyeing Bruce’s hair with irritation, although he’d put the comb away. “She’s busy,” he answered Steve, also _sotto voice_ , as Happy opened the door of a big black limo sitting in front of the hearse and ushered them in. He slid in after the rest of them had gotten in, too, looking supremely uncomfortable to not be driving. “Hogan’s sixth.”

“Busy with _what?_ ” Steve asked, his voice sharpening although he took care not to let it increase in volume.

Clint pushed a button and a thick glass wall slid up between them and the driver; then he pulled out a small device and pushed a button on the side that turned on a blue light on the tip. When nothing else happened after a second, he put it away again, apparently satisfied. “I know you hate the news, but you can’t keep completely ignoring it, Steve. Retrieval team bungled the op,” he said at normal volume. He sounded frustrated. “They missed a copy, somehow. NYT splashed it up on their homepage that they’d been targeted and released the damn article early, along with copies of what they had. Fury wanted to crack down hard, but somebody tipped the Council, and now SHIELD’s been ordered to leave the press alone.”

“And Fury rolled over?” Steve let his incredulity show.

“They got the President involved.” Clint shook his head. “Crackdowns like that are always a long shot, anyway.” 

“So this entire... event... is going to be even more of a circus?” Bruce asked, resignedly. He shook his head. “You should have let me stay in Argentina.”

“Peace, my friend,” Thor rumbled – a reminder that he, at least, could go toe-to-toe with the Other Guy, if that became necessary before the end of the day.

“Tony would want you here,” Rhodey said firmly. Then he turned to join Steve in eyeing Clint. “So if SHIELD’s ‘leaving the press alone’,” he made it sound doubtful that this was what SHIELD was actually doing, which Steve had to admit wasn’t likely, “then what’s Romanoff doing?”

“Finding the leak.” Clint looked between them, sharp-eyed. “The information they’ve got is definitely from SHIELD, and it’s definitely from somebody looking where they shouldn’t. No single agent should have that much access – nobody not us or Fury.”

“And it’s not Fury?”

Clint’s lips twitched in a smirk. “Start thinking like that, Steve, and you’re gonna get paranoid.”

“Maybe we should be,” Rhodey said, eyeing them warily. From his corner seat, Hogan looked deeply unhappy.

“This was such a mistake,” Bruce buried his head in his hands, muffling the words, and that was the last anybody spoke until the limo began to move – Steve hadn’t heard the engine thrumming to life, which meant that this car, at least, was probably provided by SI and not by SHIELD.

The procession crept forward at a slow pace, slow enough for the part of the honour guard walking along-side to easily keep up. They emerged at a snail’s pace from the garage into the light, although the tinted windows ensured that the sunlight remained pale and gloomy within the car. Steve settled for looking out the windows instead of trying to pump Clint for more information. Crowds lined the street – more than Steve would have expected, from indifferent New Yorkers, but then, with so much of Manhattan being inconvenienced for the funeral route in the first place, maybe they had nothing better to do. Maybe he was being too hard on his fellow Americans – maybe, despite the gossip and the tawdry press, they did appreciate what Tony had done for them – the memorial on the pillars gave credence to that. Or maybe they were here today because of the gossip, the fall of one so famed. Steve’s disillusionment felt like a wave of grey inside his head, washing over all his thoughts and stripping the life and colour from them.

The ride itself was uneventful, and then they were there, at the top of the drive, and the procession finally halted. Rhodey checked his watch and nodded. “Stick to the order you were given, and we’ll be fine.”

They exited the car to tastefully mournful music – so Tony hadn’t specified something about it in his Will, clearly, or they’d all have been listening to rock and roll. Solemnly, they split into two groups of three – Steve, Clint, and Bruce in one group, with Rhodey, Happy, and Thor in the other – and filed around the black hearse that was at the center of attention. A white-gloved undertaker opened the hearse’s trunk, and slowly they pulled the coffin out before lifting it up to chest height – or at least, it was chest height on Steve. The height differences meant that Bruce, Clint, and Rhodey were carrying it at shoulder-level, but the handles were placed so that neither was too great a difficulty.

Gravel crunched beneath Steve’s shoes for a few steps before they made it out onto the grass. Camera shutters clicked continuously, but at least there were no flashes, and no reporters screaming questions or talking in front of the rolling news cameras. The shutters felt obtrusive enough. Steve could understand why – he could even see it as an honour – but he couldn’t help but wish that this had been a more private ceremony. So many of the people watching today had loved to tear Tony down just as much as they’d loved to build him up, into an icon, a modern superstar – they didn’t know him. They didn’t know what they’d lost.

A stone platform with a speaking podium was set up fairly near to the gravesite, but far enough to allow seats to be set up nearby. Seating was restricted, of course – even if the audience seemed ridiculously large to Steve, used to small churches and poor plots – and Steve could see viewers lined up outside the gates, on bleachers; massive speakers were set up there, to let them hear.

The six of them marched to the platform with slow, solemn steps, then, at Rhodey’s signal, turned and lowered the casket to the table-high portion of the platform that was meant for it. Again, they all glanced towards Rhodey, and at his nod, stepped back as one. The coffin rested upon the stand with no difficulty. Rhodey tilted his head, and they filed away to take their seats at the front of the audience in the chairs that had been reserved for them. Rhodey himself remained up at the front.

There was no priest, no pastor to read out prayers for Tony. Steve felt the lack keenly, but Tony had been an atheist through-and-through – it would have been wrong to have a minister there, concerned about his immortal soul. But he couldn’t help but hope that even if Tony hadn’t believed, he _had_ ended up where he’d deserved – that he’d received some comfort in death, the comfort that he so obviously hadn’t gotten from life.

The comfort that he’d denied himself. If he had just paused – if he’d said something to Steve, _anything_ – if Steve had just fucking _noticed_ –

Rhodey tapped the microphone, checking it.

“I’d apologize for the delay, but Tony was never on time for anything in his life, so I don’t know why anybody expected him to be on time for his own funeral,” Rhodey said, and a titter of laughter washed across the audience. Steve saw Pepper, on the other side of Happy, clutching a handkerchief even as she smiled.

“He was – despite his eternal lateness – a great man,” Rhodey continued, his smile fading away. “There have already been, and in the time to come I am sure there will be many more, speeches and articles and coverage of what a genius he was, how hard he worked, and probably a lot of focus on how hard he played, too.” The underlying bitterness on that last part was so faint that Steve could barely hear it – but he could, if only because he shared the sentiment.

“Tony was all those things, and yeah, he did all those things – well, not _all_ those things – ” there was laughter, again, “ – but he was more than that, too. The first time I met him, he was just a kid - ”

Steve remembered hearing this story from the other side, told drunkenly – two weeks after Pepper had left, Tony had been... pretty much constantly drunk, but that night hadn’t been quite so bad – Steve had actually managed to make him laugh with a story about Bucky.

“I was an idiot when I was a kid,” Tony had admitted baldly. “And a pyromaniac.”

“ _Was_? I had to put you out with the fire extinguisher _last week_ – ”

“Shut up, no comments from the peanut gallery – okay, so, it’s mandatory at MIT that all the freshmen are in dorms, and sure, I could’ve gotten an exemption, but fuck that, I wanted to – but, yeah, being fourteen with a bunch of eighteen year olds, nary an adult in sight that I couldn’t buy off, no parents on my back about maintaining the family image – so, I got up to a lot of stuff, doing a lot of hacks – that’s what they call pranks, _actual_ hacking wasn’t really... like it is now – ”

Steve had met people who’d talked with their hands, before; Tony tended to talk with his entire body, leaning forward and backward, shifting, fidgeting – constantly in motion. “Right, so. Stupid kid with too much money, wanted to impress people – and hey, you know what impresses people? Shit that blows up. No, seriously,” he’d insisted when Steve had looked skeptical. “Everybody likes a good explosion, at least until you’re caught in one – ” he’d looked awkward for a moment, but bulled on through, fondness for Rhodey evidently buoying him up. “So I figured, New Years, fireworks, I was going to put on the best damn fireworks display ever, they were going to be _smart_ fireworks, none of this fuse and timer shit, they’d spell out whatever I damn well wanted them to – but funny enough, fireworks and alcohol and being a fourteen year old idiot, not such a great idea. Yeah, I burned off all my hair. No pictures exist.”

 _“Not entirely correct, sir,”_ JARVIS had murmured.

“Lies. Scandalous lies. Damnit, I knew Rhodey kept some pictures – okay, well, fair enough, he probably saved my life that night – ”

“I’ll have to ask him for copies.” Steve had been grinning. “Then next time when you blow off a training exercise – ”

Rhodey’s version cast Tony in a softer light - less of an idiot, more well-intentioned - although he changed none of the events themselves. Was that because he looked up to his friend, or was it just because that was what you _did_ at funerals? Steve recalled coming back from Gabe’s funeral and heading down to the lab because his own floor seemed impossibly empty, and if Tony could do anything (and sometimes it seemed like he could), he could take up space.

And in the month since Pepper had left, he’d learned that the other man understood loneliness.

“I thought I’d – I didn’t even recognize him,” Steve had confessed after he’d been sitting there for over an hour, sketchbook still blank in front of him. Tony – who’d been rambling on, muttering things to JARVIS that wouldn’t have made any sense to Steve even if he’d been paying attention – had cut himself off so fast that the silence felt thick and unnatural. “He was just... everything after the War... it was all so different, everything they said. I guess it was for the better – after. Easier, maybe.”

“Or not,” Tony had suggested, fiddling with a hologram and not looking up at Steve. “War is. It doesn’t. Just go away.” His words were clipped, short, like they took physical effort to force them out.

Steve’s eyes had burned; he’d put down the sketchbook and cradled his head in his hands.

“Eulogies are crap,” Tony had said then, more determinedly. “Look, okay, you’ve read – have you read _Ender’s Game_ yet?” He’d been delighted when he’d found out, when Steve had moved in, that Steve had always been a fan of sci-fi – he’d been less delighted when Steve had insisted there was something about reading off of paper books that a tablet couldn’t duplicate, but since Bruce – sadly – had no interest in it whatsoever, Tony had declared that he could live with Steve being an antique, so long as he was an antique with good taste.

“Yeah,” Steve had said, and swallowed. The book had been darkly dystopian, he’d found, and the ending had left him feeling dissatisfied, but the premise had bothered him enough that he hadn’t yet moved on to reading any of the sequels.

“Speaker for the Dead,” Tony’d said. “Note the distinction. Somebody who can speak for you, speak for your life and for your faults – eulogies. Regular ones. They don’t do that.” He quirked his lips in that way he had when he was trying to smile but couldn’t quite manage.

“They’re for the living,” Steve had murmured. “I know. I just – the living all moved on.” He’d scrubbed at his face. “It’s selfish of me.”

“Nah,” Tony had said, his expression and tone serious despite the casualness of the word. “We’re – we’re the sum of all our parts, and a bit more,” he’d said abruptly, and for a moment Steve had thought Tony was going to start philosophizing – which, although funny when Tony was drunk, was not something Steve was in the mood to indulge. He’d scowled. But Tony had stayed serious, saying, “The people left behind – we like to gloss over all the rough bits. But war’s... well, you know. I bet he did, too, even if his kids didn’t. He wouldn’t have – forgotten. But that’s... not what a eulogy’s about.” He’d looked wistful, then, as wistful as Steve had felt. “Maybe Card had the right idea about it.”

Steve had never told anyone about that conversation. Maybe he should have - but wouldn’t Tony have told Rhodey, or Pepper, or, hell, put it in his Will if he’d actually cared about it? The tasteful understated presentation of the funeral seemed so different from Tony’s usual extremity, but there wouldn’t have been any of his personality in the pomp and rote of familiar rites, either. The thought that he wouldn’t have specified _anything_ about his funeral seemed strange - Tony could be far more private than most people would have expected, but his public persona wasn’t entirely an act.

He wondered if the Will had been changed - if that should have been something to clue them all in that something was wrong in Tony’s brain. But no doubt Natasha had already looked into that.

Maybe it was a simpler explanation. Maybe Pepper and Rhodey, for all that he was sharing anecdotes about Tony’s life, preferred to keep something private of Tony for themselves. Steve couldn’t blame them - he certainly wasn’t sharing any anecdotes, but then, his speech was barely long enough to qualify as anything more than a simple statement.

“The three months that Tony spent missing in Afghanistan,” Rhodey paused, took a small sip of water from a bottle on the podium, swallowed, “were some of the worst months in my life. I know that everyone, sitting here today, will remember hearing that news -”

Steve did, though of course he’d heard it years after everyone else. Tony had been introduced to him as Howard’s son first, Iron Man second, and it had been a distant sort of hurt, the same he’d felt when he’d learned that Peggy’s second grandchild had been killed in that same war. Grief that these things had happened to the loved ones of those he cared about, tempered by the crushing numbness he’d felt in those first days out of the ice.

He hadn’t felt personal grief until that conversation about Afghanistan, and war profiteering. Maybe he wouldn’t have liked the man that Tony would have been before – maybe Tony had had something to make up to the world, for not catching on to what Obidiah Stane was doing earlier. But the way he’d torn himself up about it, the way it lurked under the surface whenever he’d had a few too many drinks -

Rhodey wound up his speech - staying far away from any discussion of the Iron Man, almost pointedly so - but Steve was only half-listening. Mostly he was rehearsing his own statement in his head, even though he had it written out on the cue card in his jacket pocket; he felt suddenly, foolishly afraid that he would open his mouth and all that would come out would be, _“Every bond you buy is a bullet in the barrel of your best guy’s gun.”_ His nerves hadn’t been this bad since before his first press conference. Then, he’d been worrying about humiliating himself. It would be even worse for this, of all things.

“It was my great honour to have known Tony Stark, and I can only hope, and try, to carry on what small part of his legacy I can.”

Applause. There was no MC - there were only three people speaking. Rhodey nodded to Steve, blank-faced, and Steve stood, one hand twitching up to fetch the cue-card before he aborted the movement, and walked to the podium instead. He had to fight the urge to break into a jog, to be done with the task as soon as he could. A few quiet murmurs broke out; Steve caught himself wishing for _more_ muttering, enough that it could be a hum instead of letting him pick out individual voices, despite how awfully disrespectful it would have been.

“ - bit tacky to be turning it into a press conference - he should have said something before,” his ears caught the words of a middle-aged woman in a black and purple dress, several rows back.

“NBC showed him going to a lot of funerals for the New York disaster,” somebody else whispered.

“ - next speaker appears to be Captain America.” That was a news reporter, from the very back of the audience, and he glanced down at the mic to prevent himself from seeking them out with his eyes. He could go make a fuss, later, when he didn’t have the cameras of every news station in the country pointed at him, when it wouldn’t be just as disrespectful to call attention to the reporter as the reporter’s own lapse.

He cleared his throat, wishing that he’d brought a bottle of water up to the podium with him like Rhodey had, even though it had seemed unnecessary for such a short speech. The first line of his statement blazed across his mind’s eye, like one of Tony’s holograms, but written in black ink instead of glowing blue.

“This country has buried a lot of heroes.”

The crowd was completely silent.

“Today, we bury another. I only met Tony a few months ago, but it quickly became apparent that he was not only one of the finest minds of our time, but also, for all his flaws, an exceptional, good man.” He looked back down at the cue card he held, to avoid looking out at the audience. “The Avengers will go on without him. New York will go on without him. Earth will go on without him. But we are made less by his absence. So.” He looked up, caught his teammates eyes; held each, one by one, before moving on. “In his memory, I can only challenge myself, and all of you, to rise higher. To look farther, build better, _be_ better. Because we have a lot to make up for – and because he’d want us to.”

He pocketed the cue card and half-walked, half-jogged back to his seat. The silence felt oppressive, but Pepper reached across Happy and squeezed his hand, before she stood for her own speech.

Steve didn’t hear much of it. There were mentions of SI, and of Tony’s failings and exceptionalities, of his philanthropic work, so often overlooked. About halfway through, his phone vibrated with a message, distracting him further, but he couldn’t check – even if he couldn’t concentrate on the speech, he had to look like he was paying attention. He couldn’t do Tony the disservice of –

Happy was rising from his seat, suddenly, and so was Clint, on Steve’s other side. Caught off-guard, he had to move quicker in order to match their movements. Solemnly, they filed back up to the platform, standing in their places about the coffin once more. Rhodey nodded very slightly, once, twice – on the third nod, they all lifted, and slowly began to march over to the hole in the ground, waiting for them. There was music playing in the background, faintly, but Steve couldn’t quite make out the melody over the rush of blood in his ears.

They lowered the coffin in on silk ropes, of such fine quality that Steve was almost surprised that they’d be used for a funeral – almost, but this was Tony Stark. Pepper, who had walked with them, stepped back, to the mound of dirt by the graveside, and took a handful, staining her silk gloves. The clumps and rocks made plunking sounds that rang in Steve’s ears when she threw it into the grave.

The music swelled, and finished. Silence hung in the air for a full minute, as Steve stared at the coffin, now with small clumps of dirt marring the shining wood. Then the undertakers stepped forward, dressing in black and with gloved hands, carrying polished shovels. Pepper and Rhodey stood back; the rest of them followed their lead.

The audience, released from its duty to sit still and listen, began to stand and disperse. Knots of people were taking advantage of the nice weather to converse outside, but most of the crowd streamed toward the nearby hall that had been booked for the public wake. Steve fell into pace with Thor and Bruce – Clint had disappeared somewhere.

“The customs of Midgard are strange to me,” Thor said quietly. Mournfully. “In times past, in Asgard, we would consign our bodies to the ground, but never with such solemnity. We drink and feast, instead, to remember their names and deeds, and celebrate their life. In modern times the bodies of our dead are placed upon wooden ships and lit ablaze, commended to the sea and flame.”

“That, uh,” Bruce glanced around at the crowds closing in – nobody had gotten too close, yet, probably due to threats of being thrown out, but looking over the heads of people Steve could see just how crowded the hall was – they wouldn’t be able to keep their space for long. “It’s... that’s what the wake is for. Maybe – ” he balked as they neared the doors. “Maybe I shouldn’t...”

“Excuse me,” Steve grabbed the attention of a young woman dressed in a uniform, with white gloves, “Could you point us in the direction of the washrooms?”

“Just this way, gentlemen,” the young lady answered politely. Steve jerked his head at Thor – _go with him_. If Bruce got overwhelmed, it was best that Thor be as nearby as possible.

He didn’t realize until they were too far away to run after – at least, in any dignified fashion – that he’d left himself alone, without the buffer of a companion. A waiter offered him a glass from a tray, but Steve waved him off – and then he had to wave off another man with a press pass fastened to his shirt, with a pointed, “No comment.” Hurriedly, he made a beeline for a dark niche and stood with his back to the wall for a minute, trying to look as if he was looking for somebody else in the crowd and didn’t want to be disturbed. Many in the crowd eyed him speculatively, even so.

After a few moments, he remembered the message he’d missed earlier, and fished his phone out of his suit pocket. It was from Natasha, and had a photograph attached – Loki, wearing the suit and scarf he’d had on in Stuttgard.

_Reporter got info from informant, informant identified man who gave info by this photo. Don’t say his name aloud._

Tension ran down his spine. Steve straightened and stepped out into the hallway that Thor and Bruce had gone down, using his height to scan over the crowds. Where was his team? This must have been why Clint had gone missing – _there_ , Clint was standing near the entrance to the men’s room, right beside Thor. Steve made a beeline for them, brushing past other mourners with half-hearted apologies.

Thor’s head was bent low so that he and Clint could talk quietly. Clint had out the device he’d pulled out before, and was holding it unobtrusively in between them – this time, lit green, and giving off a faint, high-pitched whine that Steve could just barely hear at the upper range of his hearing. It made him want to grit his teeth, but he could understand the need to keep what was being said private – and with so many reporters and SHIELD agents around, there _would_ be bugs, everywhere. “...saw him myself before we left,” Thor was saying as Steve joined them. His low rumble was much more difficult to hear from a distance than that high-pitched whine.

“Your prison’s clearly not enough to keep him slipping out through the cracks,” Clint snapped back.

“I will return to Asgard immediately and investigate this. I will not rest until I find out how he has done this, I swear to you.”

Clint’s stony look didn’t change. “You need to take an ambassador with you.”

Thor shook his head. “I fear my father would not allow it.”

“Your father’s _other_ son is a war criminal, one we trusted to Asgard to lock away. Instead he’s still fucking shit up, and may have killed Tony. Your _father_ owes us.”  Clint’s voice was quiet and vicious.

Steve looked around, trying to spot Fury. Three Avengers gathered together, heads bowed – that would draw gazes, normally, but at such an occasion as this, it could be overlooked. The angry air about them, however... they were getting attention. “Stand down, Clint,” he said softly. If they were talking about interplanetary politics, they needed a higher authority than just the team-leader of the Avengers. Had Fury attended? _One_ of the upper echelon of SHIELD must have – so where were they? Why hadn’t they already come over? Had something else happened on Natasha’s op that she hadn’t passed on to Steve?

Clint settled, but not to normal calmness – no, he was in sniper mode, now, eyes all-seeing and dead. Combat-ready. “You know I’m right,” he said to Steve, though he didn’t look away from Thor.

“Yeah, I do, but we’re not getting into a fight about it here,” he said carefully. He caught sight of Fury over at the other end of the hall, coming toward them quickly – not quick enough, in Steve’s opinion. He still remembered the devastation that Tony and Thor had wreaked across an open patch of forest – and Thor hadn’t been living with the rest of them for months, strengthening bonds cast quickly during the rash heat of battle. Not that he thought Thor would seriously fight either him or Clint – he had far too much of an advantage over them for him to consider it at all honourable – but if something went even more wrong, and Bruce got pulled into it...

Bruce _hated_ transforming. Steve did not want to make this one of those times when it was necessary.

“I’m going to have to insist you take an ambassador back with you on your return trip, your highness,” Fury said, finally joining them. “Seems like whenever Asgardians pop up on Earth, it doesn’t go too well for us. Maybe it’s time we started hosting these meetings on your territory instead.”

Steve watched Thor consider this – and consider Fury. Consider whether or not it was a threat. Well, with Fury, anything and everything could be a threat. “If I invited one of my shield-brethren, a comrade-in-arms, to view the halls of Asgard, then it would not go so amiss; for it is tradition in Asgard to welcome those mighty in courage and deed,” Thor said, with the air of one who knew _exactly_ what he was really suggesting. He glanced at Steve.

Fury glanced at Clint.

Steve looked between all three of them. Clint made a slight, abortive movement, raising his eyebrows, and Fury very slightly inclined his head. Clint’s posture loosened – like a shift into a sparring stance, for close-quarters combat.

“Captain Rogers is famed in legend,” Thor said, also observing the byplay.

“He’s needed here,” Fury said flatly, making Steve raise his eyebrows. “Agent Barton?”

“Tasha can handle my contacts,” he said. “Let me grab my bow and I’m good.”

Fury nodded, satisfied. “Then go. I want answers.”

Clint inclined his head to Fury, very slightly, but so sharply that it might have been a salute. Thor gave them both a regal nod – so much like when he’d departed with Loki, months ago. Maybe they shouldn’t have let Loki go, then – but it hadn’t seemed that much good would be done by stopping Thor from taking him, at the time.

Steve’s mouth pressed into a thin line as he watched them make their way toward the doors leading to the parking lot. “Clint took the whole incident – ” refraining from saying Loki’s name aloud made the wording bland in his mouth, “hard. I know my duty, sir.”

“Barton sees better from a distance, and if Thor’s father is disinclined to let humans onto Asgard at all, then I doubt they’re going to let any mortals get too close to anything sensitive. Your skills tend toward the sneaking in and blowing up, Captain – not observation.”

Steve set his jaw. He didn’t like it – didn’t like seeing one of his team sent off into an alien realm where lived a sorcerer that had turned his brain inside out. Unfortunately, it was dead obvious that Fury was set on this – and why was that? But Fury was already turning away – presumably, to go do crowd control on Clint and Thor’s impending public departure. Steve headed toward the doors, and a minute later spotted his teammates heading toward the lawn, weapons in hand, still in their formalwear.

He gathered a small crowd behind him, which exclaimed and gasped as Thor shouted up at the sky, his voice carrying easily over the distance. “Heimdall! Open the bifrost!”

Clouds swirled, and rainbow light cracked down. It wasn’t like watching Thor and Loki beam away via the Tesseract – that had been an earth-bound power, projecting them _up_. Watching the bifrost open was like watching some greater power reach down from the heavens and pluck his teammates from the face of the earth... which was exactly what was happening.

The light of the bifrost vanished, and they were gone.

“So,” said Rhodey quietly, stepping up to Steve’s elbow, “Fury’s doing damage control, Banner’s hiding in the bathroom, the Black Widow’s – elsewhere, and your other teammates just vanished off to another planet. What’d you find out, Captain?”

Steve winced. He owed Rhodey. Checking around for anybody watching too close – hopefully without looking completely suspicious while he was at it – he slid his phone out and pulled up the message, then passed it to Rhodey.

Rhodey let out a low whistle, his eyes flicking over the screen a second time before he passed the phone back. “I want in.”

“It’s not my command,” Steve said softly, mindful of listening ears. As far as the operation went, Natasha was lead – and as far as the Avengers went, Steve didn’t have the authority to demand USAF relinquish Rhodey to his team.

“Captain.” There was steel in Rhodey’s voice, and when Steve met his eyes, he was reminded of the codename that Rhodey had been given, when he was wearing his suit – the War Machine. “I want in.”

Steve set his jaw. If they couldn’t trust Rhodey... if they couldn’t trust Tony’s best friend... “Alright.”

“Good. Then let’s go.”

 

 

 

It quite wasn’t that simple, of course. Rhodey had to say goodbye to Pepper, and make other arrangements besides - after Rhodey took his leave of Pepper, Steve overheard him talking to Happy in a low voice, practically ordering him to stay with Pepper as much as possible even when he wasn’t driving her anywhere. Whatever Happy thought of this was concealed by his dark sunglasses, but he nodded in agreement. Steve flagged down a junior SHIELD agent and requested transportation back to the Tower, but they couldn’t discuss anything en-route; Rhodey tried to ask and Steve shook his head, before tilting his chin subtly toward their driver, earning himself a raised eyebrow from Rhodey. But if most of Tony’s hologram’s concern about loose lips had been due to Asgardian eavesdroppers, there had also been very definite distrust toward the rank and file of SHIELD as well – and they didn’t yet know if Loki _had_ been eavesdropping, or if he’d actually suborned some agents.

Instead, Rhodey spent the ride on the phone with his superiors, wrangling things about so it was even possible for him to suddenly be missing. Steve had to step in twice, phoning Hill to get her to bring certain appropriate pressure to bear. Hill, at least, sounded pleased at the news – no doubt, both Rhodey and Steve himself pulling for the War Machine to become part of the Avengers would help SHIELD’s case.

Natasha was already at the Tower when they arrived, three hours later, delayed by the absolute mess of traffic that the funeral procession had made. She was dressed in SHIELD ‘business casual’: jeans and an open jacket over top of her jump-suit. Rhodey smiled wryly at her as they walked in. “Ms. Rushman.”

“Colonel Rhodes,” Natasha returned with perfect aplomb. She was seated at the main table, screens spread out across it. Loki’s photo was featured prominently in the middle. She tapped a pair of photos to one side of it, and they obediently enlarged and floated upward so that Steve and Rhodey could easily see them. “The reporter from the Times,” Natasha pointed at the first, and then at the second, “His information source.”

“And L-”

“Don’t,” said Natasha sharply. Rhodey tossed her a confused look. “Our alien friends have ears.”

“Pepper told me about the, uh, the message he left behind,” Rhodey said slowly, “I’d thought...” he trailed off, shook his head, and finally admitted in a low voice, “I thought he’d gone off the deep end again.”

“Maybe he did,” Natasha said. Steve flinched; her eyes flicked to him and then back to Rhodey. “If he’s here, we’ll find him. Fury’s pulled in every favour he has to look for him, and keep it quiet.”

 _That_ was almost certainly a lie, because Nick wasn’t the sort of man who ever put all of his eggs in one basket, and Natasha wasn’t the sort of woman who’d believe he would. From the way Rhodey snorted, he didn’t buy it either. “Yeah, well. You find him, I want in on that, too.” He split his glare between Steve and Natasha, uncompromising. “I should have been in on this from the start. From now on? You keep me in the loop.”

“We needed you where you were,” Natasha said, unapologetic. Steve wondered what that was about. More power-plays about the War Machine? Or had it been something else? SI, for all that it didn’t make weapons anymore, had a hell of a lot of government contracts – and Rhodey had a lot of history with the company.

“There’s no money like big government money,” Tony had told him once, at the end of waxing rhapsodically about the Helicarrier, when Steve had wondered aloud how much it cost. “Seriously – take SI, I mean, one of the largest companies in the world, and then you go and compare to the government’s budget – we are a _drop_. A drop in the fucking bucket. But money – money is not what it’s about, no, don’t look at me like that, I’m not saying we don’t need tax reform, Jesus, put away the puppy-dog eyes – it’s about connections. You go in and you build the infrastructure and you do it the best – we make the Pentagon’s firewalls, always have, so, they can’t exactly fire us, now can they?”

“No.” Rhodey shook his head. “You need me someplace, you tell me where and why, you don’t go hiding things like this. Tony’s my best friend. You do _not_ keep this shit from me.”

“Alright,” Steve agreed before Natasha could reply again. He nodded to Rhodey. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” Perhaps he hadn’t been in on all the things that Natasha had ears to, but he’d known that Rhodey was being cut out, and he’d let his fear over what Rhodey might have to say to him, and his anger over Fury moving so quickly to replace Tony, prevent him from doing the right thing. That was unacceptable.

He’d made too many mistakes already.

Natasha nodded, if perhaps a bit grudgingly, and flicked her hand across the table; all the files displayed collapsed. “Fine. SHIELD is looking into the alien angle - it’s up to us to find what Tony was hiding.”

“Hold up,” Rhodey said. “About the alien angle – ”

“We can’t do anything here from Earth that SHIELD’s grunts can’t do.”

“If we can trust them,” Steve said, tapping his fingers on the table. When Natasha looked at him, he explained, “Before, when he was here – he relied on Clint a lot.” He felt uncomfortably glad that Clint was not around for this discussion.

Natasha raised an eyebrow at him, letting her eyes slip to Rhodey, who rolled his eyes. “Yeah, because Tony didn’t tell me all the details,” Rhodey said with exaggerated patience.

“One could hope,” she replied, sounding faintly resigned, but not surprised. “We know SHIELD might be compromised. The Director’s accounting for that.”

“The morgue techs,” Steve said, remembering the video and her earlier words.

She shook her head. “I examined the body myself,” she said, with such perfect aplomb that Steve didn’t even wince at the word ‘body’ – not until he saw Rhodey do so, cueing word to connect to meaning in his head. “There wasn’t any mark.” She let that hang in the air significantly.

 Steve frowned, and then – “Right. Enhancement research.”

“Enhancement – _what_?” Rhodey asked, and that answered that question. “You gonna fill me in?” His tone was still over-patient as he looked between the two of them.

“On the flight,” Natasha said, standing and checking her watch indiscreetly. “A helicopter will be here in a few minutes to take us to the airport.” She smiled, and it was her Natalie Rushman smile: professional, business-like, bland. “Pack your bags quickly. We’re on the clock.”


	2. Shēnzhèn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Stark Industries private jumbo jet wasn’t the fastest that they had at their disposal, but Natasha had her reasons for picking it, as she explained shortly after takeoff. “None of us are going to be able to pass for natives,” she said, flicking up a map of where they were heading - Shenzhen Bao’An International Airport. “Obviously. We’re not going to try. You’re Tony’s dear friends, and I’m representing Pepper, coming over to ensure that during the restructuring of SI none of Tony’s personal projects – or their funding – get cut. We fully support his work, after all.”

Steve nodded slowly. Money – money was a powerful motivator, always had been, always would be.

“We have an advantage that most foreigners don’t have,” she continued. “JARVIS will be able to translate for us, discreetly.” She pulled two plastic bags from her shoulder-bag and tossed one each to Rhodey and Steve. Steve turned the bag over slowly in his hands before opening it. There were two earpieces inside – one small, tiny, and flesh-toned, obviously meant to be covert. The other was looked like a standard, low-key wireless earpiece for a phone: black, and about two inches long, with the SI logo engraved discreetly but visibly upon the outside. He tried the first one, and then the second one, in his ear, and they both fit like they’d been made for him. They probably had.

_“The necessary linkups for me to download myself into the Shēnzhèn facilities have not yet been reconnected. Once those links are made, I will be able to assess whether I can interface with directly with the system there, or if I will need to continue from an indirect satellite connection. A direct connection would be greatly preferable.”_

“We’ll do our best.” Natasha smiled thinly. “Both of you have homework. Colonel, JARVIS will have the information from our investigation so far made available to you. Steve, if you’re not up to date on what’s been going on in the news then it’s going to look very strange, and you’ll miss things. JARVIS, could you get a summary collection together for him?”

_“Of course.”_

“How’s the virus scanning going?” Steve asked him.

 _“Slowly,”_ said JARVIS, very dryly. _“It appears that several other employees of Stark Industries also find it difficult to channel their creativity appropriately.”_

“Gentlemen,” Natasha looked between the two of them. “Let’s get to work.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_“...and now for the market news. The TSX and Dow Jones both launched lawsuits against the Stark estate earlier today, alleging illegal trading practices. Yesterday the estate made its returns available to the public, following a lawsuit launched by Morgan Stark, Tony Stark’s closest living relative, against Stark Industries CEO Virgina Potts, the executor and named sole beneficiary of the estate. Those returns revealed that Stark had managed to increase his wealth by over twelve billion dollars in the last half year, with over ninety percent of the increase made from profits on the stock market – an increase that the exchanges are arguing would be impossible to accomplish, especially in such a low-key manner, without fraud. But not all experts agree.”_

The screen switched over to a male reporter, his hands open, raised palm-up as he spoke earnestly into a microphone. _“The thing is, Cindy – and everybody knows this, but they forget it a lot of the time, because he’s always in the tabloids with his pants down – the thing is, Stark was a mathematical genius. An absolute genius – he had a doctorate in applied mathematics by the time he was nineteen, and that wasn’t even his first Ph.D. And he had a doctorate in computer engineering, too. We’ve known, since forever, that there’s a mathematical basis to the stock market – and that’s why we have algorithmic trading, where we’ve got computers driving the trades, on seconds and milliseconds. And people have been looking for the perfect formula to get profits out of that. Well, Stark was a genius – it seems entirely plausible to think that he’d found it.”_

 _“One thing is certain,”_ the screen returned to Cindy, _“And that is without the increase, Stark’s fortune would be substantially reduced. Stark Industries stock closed this week forty-eight points down from Monday, the day before Stark’s alleged suicide, resulting in a six-point-three billion dollar loss to the estate. If the courts rule in her favour, the inheritance will skyrocket Virginia Potts to the spot of world’s richest woman, and the seventh richest person, with a total wealth of thirty-one billion dollars.”_

 

 _“The thing that everybody should be focused on,”_ said the middle-aged man on the screen, punctuating his comment with an emphatic gesture toward his audience, _“is why the cover-up? Stark’s – I mean, I’m sorry, I hate to speak ill of the dead, but the guy’s always been a bit unhinged. Finding out he committed suicide isn’t really so surprising. The thing that’s surprising is that a secretive government agency was trying to pretend it was heart failure.”_

_“So are you saying – ”_

_“I’m saying that we know there are plenty of senators out there who aren’t happy with the Avengers, with a group of superpowered individuals, and Tony Stark is the guy who really kicked that off a couple years ago. I’m saying that Stark stopped making weapons for the government and started making weapons for himself, and that’s made a lot of people nervous. I’m saying that this was the guy who hacked Department of Defense servers on national television and then walked away without even a slap on the wrist – and that had to scare a lot of people.”_

_“Assassination theories are jumping the gun a bit, don’t you think?”_

_“We’ve already been lied to once. Why not make it twice?”_

_“I know that Stark’s death is a big piece of news, especially with a government-funded cover-up, but there’s not enough attention being paid to the Stark estate funds. This guy made_ twelve billion dollars _off of the stock market in six months. Now, sure, he had plenty of capital to invest, but the bottom line still stands – he_ beat _the stock market. He figured out computer-driven trading. We need to get on top of that, fast, because Stark may have been a visionary, but he’s not the only genius out there. He’s proven that the system is fundamentally_ broken, _and the world governments had better scramble fast to either fix it or shut it down.”_

_“But Bob, you’re not considering – all along, people have been saying, we don’t know the effects yet of computer-driven trades on the market. We don’t know how they’re going to affect long-term market trends. This is all part of this – maybe it’s a winning strategy, but it’s a strategy that’s going to change the game, so fundamentally, that it’s not going to be winning forever. It’s like in game theory – sometimes there is no best solution, there’re only a number of possible solutions.”_

_“Game theory’s an abstraction, we’re talking about hard and fast results – ”_

 

 

Steve took a handful of anti-nausea meds halfway through the flight – the prescribed dose, for him. It wasn’t due to air turbulence. The side effects at least made him drowsy enough to try sleeping for a few hours – Natasha and Rhodey had both long since gone to bed, making use of the cluster of private rooms that the Stark jet offered, with warnings that he ought to try to sleep at some point himself, lest the time difference sneak up on him. He had waved them off at the time.

The plane thrummed around him as he lay in bed – it might run off of an arc reactor, but it was the turbines that caused the noise and vibration, or so Tony had explained the first time Steve had flown anywhere with him. The casualness with which Tony occasionally jetted off to places halfway across the world was a bit shocking – it was the exact same casualness that Howard had had when he’d asked Peggy out to Paris for fondue, magnified by the speed and technology of the future to go further, run farther.

When he finally got to sleep, he dreamed of Tony and Peggy sharing a fondue pot, laughing with each other like the best of friends, and he woke feeling cold.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two hours before they were due to land, they gathered around the main cabin’s table and made battle plans.

“The director of operations in Shēnzhèn is Lu Wei – Lu is his family name, Wei personal, no relation of Lu Chen,” Natasha informed Steve. “Don’t call him by his personal name, that’s rude.”

“I met him – years ago,” Rhodey said. “’03? Tony – ” he glanced between them, looking uncomfortable when Steve looked away and Natasha pointedly didn’t, but continued on gamely despite a note of grief in his voice, “Tony liked him – well, not personally, but Lu’s very efficient, got all his ducks in order, didn’t want to take up any more of Mr. Stark’s time than he had to – Tony liked that, all the meetings got done early and gave him more time to go party.”

“He was in the files I flagged,” Steve said, studying the man’s picture. Perhaps fifty years old – his file had said fifty-two – Lu had an unremarkable face, thinning hair, and a clearly professional demeanour, even through a photograph. “Moving people around...”

“His financial trail is suspicious, too,” Natasha commented, outlining the specifics of what she’d found, before moving on to the few other people they had to watch out for. “His personal assistants – Meng Hui and Su Mei – are the ones we need to watch the closest. Tony wouldn’t trust any more people than he had to. He chose Lu because he was trustworthy, discreet, and efficient,” she nodded at Rhodey. “And he probably had JARVIS watching Lu every moment of every day.”

_“Most likely so, yes.”_

“And the leak?” Rhodey asked, but Steve already knew the answer to that, before Natasha spoke.

“It wasn’t from SI’s end. We might still find his influence here, of course.”

Steve studied the maps as she talked. The Stark Science and Technology Park, as it was officially called, was a walled compound that covered several square miles, and included not only the factories, but also dormitories and recreation areas for hundreds of thousands of workers. And it was only one – albeit the largest – of the three factory parks that SI used, with the others both in India. Steve thought about Howard, who had personally designed the Commandos’ gear and then gone on to work on the Manhattan Project, and about Tony, who had tossed aside that legacy and built himself a new one. No, they’d both known what responsibility was, even if Tony had to be constantly hounded by his long-suffering PA to get the paperwork done. But then, Howard’s ability to requisition things off the books had been legendary.

 _“A significant portion of the Park has been or is currently under construction to build facilities for the next Starkphone release,”_ JARVIS said when Natasha had finished her overview. Portions of the map lit up. _“However, if I may make a recommendation, I believe you should focus your efforts here.”_ The R &D building in the centre of the park shaded red. _“Power logs for this building are suspiciously short.”_

“Design’s been moved to Delhi,” Natasha said, glancing at the map and tilting her head.

_“If it were merely due to the section being shut down, then I would still be able to access the full logs.”_

“Fair enough,” Natasha conceded.

“We still need to look at recent construction sites, though. Anything newer than six months,” Rhodey said, frowning in concern. “He could have more than one site.”

“More sites mean more eyes,” Natasha said, checking something on her tablet. “We’ll see where Lu wants to show us first, and see if we can check what he doesn’t.” She met Steve’s eyes, then Rhodey’s. “You two have the better chance to play disinterested. Rushman will run distraction.”

“And if we find the missing scientists there?”

“SHIELD,” Steve said. The word was sour in his mouth – he didn’t like it. But the Avengers certainly didn’t have the authority to hold anyone, and neither did SI; they needed government backing.

Rhodey shook his head. “I met Maya Hansen once. I wasn’t surprised when she wound up in jail for murder. Woman was a sociopath. And these others... if SHIELD starts cutting deals with them, we’ll all regret it.”

“I’ll be keeping an eye on it,” Natasha said, and Steve glanced at her in surprise. She met his gaze squarely, and he looked away, feeling ashamed for doubting she would.

When they touched down at the airport in Shēnzhèn, officials from both the Chinese government and the local division of SI were waiting to meet them, the latter handling the former’s custom concerns with great efficiency – so great that Steve wouldn’t have realized that was what the government bureaucrats were there for at all, except for JARVIS murmuring in his ear. The result was that they were ushered in from the tarmac in short order, which was a relief; his brain was determinedly insisting that it ought to be dark out, making the afternoon sunlight feel strange. The air hung heavy with humidity and smog mixed together, and even though he immediately took off his jacket he was sweating like a pig before they reached the tarmac’s edge.

Natasha had transformed herself before they’d disembarked from the plane, once again donning the persona of Natalie Rushman. Watching her interact with the Chinese officials, though, was far more disconcerting than merely seeing her in a high-level PA’s business formal. Her entire demeanour shifted, all her sharp edges not so much smoothed away as rearranged to fit with Rushman’s personality: a demure, but high-efficiency, cut-throat executive, dressed in business formal clearly tailored for the climate; either that, or she had a far higher tolerance for the heat than Steve did, but either way she looked as though her pale skin was cool as ice. The small signs of softness she occasionally showed vanished almost entirely, becoming velvet over granite.

“Man, I’ve been watching her do that all week and it’s still surprising,” Rhodey murmured to Steve as they were ushered into a dark car – a small car, by American standards, but it was far larger than any of the vehicles that the government bureaucrats were getting into – and it had air conditioning, thank the Lord. That was definitely one future technology he’d cheerfully embrace.  “Seeing her in her off-time has made it too weird.”

Their driver leaned in to shut the door as Steve shrugged in reply. “She’s good at what she does.”

Natasha caught the words, and smiled at them – warm, but distant: Natalie’s smile. It was a far cry from Natasha’s usual smiles, which were small – half the time she barely quirked her lips – and far more about what her eyes were doing than her mouth. Natalie’s smile was a pointed reminder: keep in-role, even if you thought you were being vague enough. Rhodey tipped his head in apology.

Shortly, one of the SI employees joined them in the car: Su Mei, one of Lu’s assistants, come to see to them personally. She spoke softly to the driver in Chinese: _“Take us to the Futian Shangri-La hotel, please,”_ JARVIS translated in Steve’s ear. Then she turned back and smiled professionally. “We understand that the time difference from New York is quite shocking,” she said in accented English – but something about the accent seemed... strange. Almost as if it were affected. Steve snuck a glance at Natasha, but she didn’t look back. “I have booked suites for you at – ”

“I’m sorry,” Natasha cut in smoothly; Su immediately ceased speaking and looked to Natasha attentively. “I was unable to send you a complete schedule earlier, due to some uncertainty in New York, but our time in Shēnzhèn is quite limited. I’d like to meet with Mr. Lu and begin our tour of the facilities as soon as possible.”

Su showed only the slightest sign of surprise, and nodded calmly, pulling out her Starkphone. “I apologize for the presumption; of course, Mr. Lu is at your disposal. I will send him a message to let him know about the change in plans.” Turning her head, she spoke to the driver: _“Change of route. Take us directly to the Park, VIP entrance.”_

Having JARVIS there to murmur translations in his ear was like having a whole secret world opened up to him. Steve had always admired, almost envied, the way that Gabe and Jacques could switch languages mid-sentence, transitioning from one to the other with complete ease. While he’d picked up a fair amount of French, and was fluent in German, he’d never acquired that second-nature habit, and it was a bit intimidating to be on a team with three people who occasionally code-switched. Sometimes he’d walk into Tony’s lab and find him conversing with somebody in Russian or Japanese, only for him to break off and greet Steve in English; one week they’d ended up talking mostly in French, honing Steve’s rusty skills. Natasha and Clint both spoke a wide swath of languages, too; Bruce, on the other hand, was in the same boat as Steve, only half fluent in Spanish, Hindi, and Bengali.

 _“Would you like me to create a delay in the network the message is on?”_ JARVIS asked politely. Natasha resettled herself in her seat and dropped her chin just slightly in the process. _“Message delayed. It will be delivered approximately three minutes prior to your arrival.”_

Steve had travelled the width and breadth of Europe, and he’d ventured into the northern parts of Africa, but he’d never been further east. Shēnzhèn didn’t look that much different from Chinatown – it didn’t even look that much different from Manhattan, except maybe it had more trees and less skyscrapers. The signs were all in Chinese, but the licence plates were in numerals, and the architecture of the larger buildings was just like that in any other modern city he’d seen – clean, and washed of all history.

The car ride was not long, and soon enough they were putting through an ornate pair of gates, guarded by bored-looking young men in grey and brown uniforms, who scanned a card that Su handed to the driver and waved them through. The driveway inside the park was pleasant – then again, this _was_ the VIP entrance – and lined with trees; their car pulled smoothly to a stop outside of a sleek, ultra-modern looking building that was four stories tall, and probably the size of several football fields. Lu and Meng were waiting outside it with neutral expressions, which brightened as they all exited the car, shoes crunching on the gravel.

 “Ms. Rushman,” Lu shook hands with Natasha, first, giving her a close-mouthed smile. “I apologize for your hurried arrival.” He sounded faintly embarrassed. “Arrangements should have been made to bring you to a hotel, first, to give you a chance to rest.” His accent was a blend of British and Chinese, more the former than the latter.

“Oh, they were,” Natasha said, returning his smile with an eerie mimicry. There was something about them that was very... alike, more so than just their similar heights and reserved dress – some sort of professional watchfulness that reminded Steve of men in smart suits and bowler hats, heading for the Stock Exchange. Power brokers. “But as I explained to Ms. Su, we only have a few days to spend here before we must return to New York. Time is precious.”

“Certainly. Your visit may be unexpected, but it is very welcome. We have all been concerned about the future.”

“The Park will certainly play an important role in SI’s plans moving forward,” Natasha assured him. “But I’d like to tour the facilities first. At the moment, we’re still taking stock of all our options and resources, and considering how this development will impact us. Some of Mr. Stark’s friends have accompanied me – may I introduce Captain Rogers and Colonel Rhodes?”

“It is an honour to meet you, Captain Rogers,” the director said, extending a hand for a handshake. “I am Lu Wei, the director of operations here in the Stark Science and Technology Park.”

His handshake was firm and practiced. Steve nodded in acknowledgement. “I just wish my visit could be under better circumstances,” he said.

“Of course,” Lu demurred, moving on to Rhodey. “Colonel Rhodes, we met some years ago, I recall. It is good to see you again.”

Rhodey shook his hand agreeably. “Well, after SI pulled out of the weapons business, I had fewer opportunities to visit. But I heard that the reconstruction went well.”

“Yes, quite,” Lu said as he ushered them into a waiting elevator; one assistant stayed at his side, while the other brought up the rear. Steve had to keep them both in view in order to avoid mixing them up, and wondered if they dressed and styled their hair so similarly on purpose. “Of course, in today’s technological economy, we are undergoing constant reconstruction, in order to be able to produce the next generation of devices. Currently one third of our facilities are undergoing reconstruction for just that purpose. When they are complete we will be able to begin production of the Supernova – ” he rattled off a series of technical specifications that made no sense to Steve, but made Natasha smile and nod proudly – the expression of someone who already knew everything said, but was proud of the accomplishment being talked about. Steve endeavoured to look suitably impressed.

“The major development – that’s all done here as well?” Rhodey asked, looking about as they exited the elevator onto a brightly lit floor. They were on a balcony overlooking a large room, with as glass wall keeping them separate; below, hundreds – maybe thousands – of white-clothed workers sat at the factory line. The array was huge – and Steve knew it was just one factory out of a dozen. The white noise of many different machines running at the same time was muted but not entirely cancelled by the glass wall, and filled the air with a pervasive background hum.

“Yes, although this building is dedicated to production. Our facilities are currently equipped to produce 200,000 Starkphones per day,” Lu informed them as they looked out. “150,000 of those are the Nova 3, such as produced in this factory, while the remainders are the Slim model.” He slowly led the way along the glassed-off balcony as he spoke, giving them plenty of opportunity to see what they were looking at. “If it is acceptable, I will show you the manufacturing and living divisions today, and tomorrow we will tour the research and development labs.”

“Perfectly acceptable,” Natasha agreed, but when Lu glanced away to look at the factory floor, she caught Steve’s eyes and shook her head once, from side to side, ever-so-slightly.

“Currently we employ...”

Steve kept track of the conversation as he trailed after them; Lu, after initial attempts to include Steve in the conversation, focused mainly upon Natasha and Rhodey. Natasha played the part of an SI powerbroker perfectly – but then, she actually _was_ employed by SI, as Natalie Rushman. “Ms. Potts wants to ensure that during the transition process, and after, the audit won’t find any decrease in working conditions. Foxconn has been making overtures...”

“...has always been our highest concern...”

Rhodey kept up his own questions – mostly about how things had changed. Occasionally, if Lu didn’t have an answer immediately, he’d glance at one of his assistants – who would. Before SI had pulled out of weapons manufacturing, there’d been only half as many factories – but once Tony had scrapped the military funding, the Starkphone – SI’s second-biggest profit-bringer – had become their most important division. For a time. Then the energy division had taken the fore.

Eventually, after they’d toured through five factories – the differences of which were largely lost on Steve, although Rhodey and Natasha still looked interested – and were slowly moving through a sixth, conversation turned back to R&D. “It was, of course, a disappointment to many here when the final decision was made to base the StarkEngine production in Delhi, and closed that portion of our research facilities here. Our remaining R&D division is dedicated almost entirely to the Starkphone production, although in compliance with Mr. Stark’s mandate, we do allow personal projects.”

“We would like to see some of those,” Natasha said politely. “With Mr. Stark passed, it is more important than ever that talent and creativity is fostered within the company.”

“Of course. I will ensure that due time is spent there tomorrow,” Lu assured her. 

Over-tiredness was easy to fake; his sleep on the flight had been too restless, leaving Steve with a weary edge. By the time they were on the seventh factory, he’d let himself start swaying occasionally on his feet.

The eighth factory, according to the map he’d memorized, was the nearest to the R&D building JARVIS had pinpointed. As they were on the concourse heading to it, Steve jumped into a pause in the conversation. “Please excuse me,” he said. “This has been... ah... a difficult couple of days for me. Would it be possible for me to go on ahead to the hotel?”

“Certainly,” Lu said at once, glancing at the three of them with reserved concern. “We can delay the rest of this tour for another time, of course.”

“We don’t have much time,” Natasha repeated, frowning.

“I could go alone – if someone could show me,” Steve offered. “I don’t need to delay the rest of you.”

“I might turn in as well,” Rhodey said with a grimace. “It was a long flight.”

“If you are sure, Ms. Rushman?” Lu asked. At Natasha’s nod, he said to Steve, “Ms. Meng can take you to your hotel, sirs,” indicating one of the assistants with a nod.

“Please, follow me,” Meng said. Her voice was light and pleasant, with the same odd accent as Su’s, and Steve wondered if they really did deliberately work at being so similar that they were almost interchangeable. He could certainly think of situations where that would be useful, if Lu was up to something – no doubt Natasha could think of even more. But didn’t it take away the advantage if they were both seen in one place? Unless they had a third partner – or more...

They took an elevator back to ground floor, and exited through a pair of double glass doors into the heat outside. Here, inside the Park, there were plenty of off-duty workers, and although Steve had grown up in the narrow confines of the city, the crowded nature of the Park’s streets made him feel almost claustrophobic. He stood inches over everyone else – although that wasn’t unusual anywhere he went – and he could see that although he felt pressed in upon, he, Rhodey, and Meng were given much more space than most people, which oddly enough made him feel lonely at the same time. All the surrounding conversations were in Chinese, rapid-fire with all the words overlapping, and completely incomprehensible: JARVIS didn’t bother to translate. Steve felt like an alien.

As they passed the R&D building the crowds thinned out and Rhodey said, a bit wistfully, “I remember the ribbon-cutting party for that place – well, the east wing, at least. Tony... Tony wouldn’t shut up about it – biomedical research,” he said to Steve, “prostheses – really difficult mechanical problems, those, the sort of thing Tony loved.”

Steve nodded, letting his grief show. He had a hard enough time concealing the spike of nausea in his stomach, at the way that Rhodey so easily used Tony’s name to give them an opening, even now. How could he? But then, how could he not?

It wasn’t as if Steve were any better; he took the opening and ran with it, asking Meng, “I guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to take a look in there?”

“That is the current itinerary,” Meng said, slightly cautious.

“I’d like to see it,” Steve murmured, stopping to stare up at it like a tourist. “Tony always had...” he gestured widely, but very non-descriptively, with his hands. Rhodey nodded, half-smiling at the gesture.

“If you would like to see them today, I would simply need to get approval from Mr. Lu,” she offered, pulling out her phone – a Supernova, apparently, from the lettering on the back. It must have been a prototype.

“No, that’s fine,” Steve waved her off. If Lu had plans in place to pull out, he needed to not be alerted – and JARVIS could delay any message, but if she wanted a reply _back_ , then that wouldn’t do. But they needed to get in there – how?

Rhodey, fortunately, had a solution. “Uh, but if they have washrooms in there, I wouldn’t mind a brief stop.” He sounded embarrassed – was that a thing, here?

“Oh, of course,” Meng said smoothly. She led the way into the building, getting past the guards at the door – and the security – with a pass-card, and down a short flight of steps into an atrium. The air-conditioned interior hallways were much larger, and higher, than in the factory sections: this building had been built with Western sensibilities in mind. There were three very secure-looking doors leading tantalizingly deeper into the building, each going off in a different direction, but Meng led them up a wide flight of stairs instead, onto a second floor thathad a balcony overlooking the entryway atrium, then down a smaller hallway off to the side, ending at a door with a keypad. Meng entered the combination – 45398, Steve noted – and stood to one side politely.

“Thanks,” Rhodey said, stepping inside. The door lock clicked back into place as soon as the door closed, leaving Steve and Meng standing outside in slightly awkward silence. He turned, sweeping the hall, pretending to examine the odd, abstract pictures on the wall while trying to pick out security cameras – they had to be here, in a facility like this. Would JARVIS be able to hack in?

There was the sound of a toilet flushing – something high-powered, but only barely audible through the door. Meng probably couldn’t hear it. In his ear, JARVIS murmured, _“I have assumed control of audio feeds planted within the washroom and hallway... and within the rest of the building. Blueprints for this building show that there are closed-circuit camera feeds in every hallway, which I am unfortunately unable to access. If you will give me a few minutes, I do have other methods I may yet attempt.”_

 _“A man could be forgiven for taking a few minutes to check out the contents of this bathroom,”_ Rhodey said, _very_ dryly. _“The Jacuzzi is a nice touch.”_

A _Jacuzzi?_ Good Lord.

 _“You might see if there’s any way to distract the guards watching the cameras,”_ Rhodey suggested. _“Video’s only good if they notice us doing something.”_

 _“It would be a trifling matter to trip an alarm elsewhere, but without eyes or ears in the security room itself I would be unable to verify their inattention,”_ JARVIS cautioned.

_“Full building evac.”_

Even if Rhodey sounded like he was half joking, Steve grimaced at the suggestion – an expression that Meng didn’t miss. “I’m sorry for the delay, Captain,” she apologized as if it were her fault, pulling out her phone. “I will have someone come to take you directly to your hotel.”

“That’s not necessary,” Steve held up a hand to dissuade her. His other hand he slipped casually into his jacket pocket as he leaned back against the wall – the pocket with his phone. “I’m military,” he thumbed the up volume button once, activating his comm. feed, “I’ve plenty of experience with ‘hurry up and wait’. It’s no trouble.” He thumbed it off again.

 _“Message received,”_ Rhodey said, a tad bit too much irony in his tone. Maybe Steve was being stupid, taking the idea as a serious suggestion. _“What if we patched you into the camera system?”_

_“That would quite possibly give me access to the entire security system- if you were capable of doing so without alerting security, of course.”_

_“Localized EMP from my phone.”_

_“Given the reassuringly high level of isolation of the feeds, that is an excellent idea,”_ JARVIS said. He sounded almost surprised – what was _that_ about? _“Colonel Rhodes, the modifications to your phone – ”_

_“ – I’ll distract Meng, break something in here or something – hand you my phone, Steve - ”_

_“The EMP will unfortunately completely disable Colonel Rhodes’ phone, Captain. You will need to connect your own phone in the following manner – ”_ Steve got the impression that JARVIS was carrying on entirely different conversations with each of them, but he tried not to think about it, instead concentrating on memorizing the technical instructions JARVIS passed him while looking like he was doing nothing of the sort.

A minute later, Rhodey knocked on the bathroom door, and called through, “Uh, is there a janitor or technician – I, uh, think I broke this thing, in the minibar – ”

“It’s perfectly fine,” Meng said calmly. “A technician will take care of it later.” Inside the bathroom, there was a sudden high-pitched whine that made Steve wince.

“Are you sure?” Rhodey opened the door and stuck his head through; the whine grew irritatingly loud. “Maybe you should take a look – sorry, the whisky looked tempting, it’s been a long day – ” he turned back hopefully to look at the minibar – well, no, that was incorrect, Steve thought, as he took a good look at the contents of the room; it was a full bar, stocked with _everything_. No wonder they needed a Jacuzzi in there.

“Oh – well, yes,” Meng reluctantly entered. Steve shook his head again, and clapped Rhodey on the shoulder; when his hand dropped back to the side, and he began to turn away from him, Rhodey slipped him his phone, before turning to go ‘help’ Meng with whatever JARVIS had broken. It was such a casual, easy gesture – so perfectly timed and in tune to Steve’s own movements – that he was almost knocked off-balance. It felt like that first time working with Tony to repair the Helicarrier; it felt like an espionage mission with the Commandos.

He stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered down the hall, looking as bored as he could manage, although he feared he just wound up looking wooden, too much of his concentration going to hiding how rattled he felt. Focus. He had a job to do.

 _“The volume down button will trigger the EMP,”_ JARVIS advised him. Steve keyed off his comm. and his own phone, and triggered Rhodey’s.

The lights overhead flickered, very briefly. The ones ten feet away weren’t affected at all. Steve eyed the security camera almost hidden in the ceiling tiles and jumped for it; he didn’t manage to get any purchase on the tiles, plaster nearly coming away in his hands before he let go, but he did manage to pull the camera down, cords and all. His boots landed on the hallway’s carpet – dense, but very short; designed for heavy traffic – without any noise. JARVIS’s instructions replayed in his memory as Steve ripped away wires, stripping them with his teeth – and there was one thing that spending time in the labs of mad scientists was good for – until he could make the connections to his phone, which was certainly not a Nova 3, or a Supernova, or anything that would ever be available on the commercial market. Fifteen seconds... thirty... done. Awkwardly, holding all the wires in place with one hand, he turned his earbud back on.

 _“Video footage replaced... investigating the security system. Cameras in the security room show normal activity,”_ JARVIS reported.

“Can you upload something to keep an eye on it if I disconnect my phone?”

 _“Unfortunately, the system’s laudable security means that there is no other method of remote access, and the system itself does not possess sufficient hardware to support a clone of my program,”_ JARVIS explained regretfully. _“I can seed viruses, but without the connection will be unable to monitor them.”_

“Right,” Steve muttered, pulling a thin roll of duct tape from his jacket pocket with his free hand. He tore off strips with his teeth, using them to tape the wires in place, and then he jumped up again, hiding the phone away in the ceiling and pushing the tiles back to normal. It likely wouldn’t hold up against even a cursory inspection – but with any luck, and JARVIS in the security systems, they could keep such an inspection from happening. People hated to look up.

 _“Blocking outgoing messages from Ms. Meng’s phone,”_ JARVIS announced, no doubt in response to whatever was happening in the washroom. Steve winced.

“Can we lock her in there?” They didn’t need a tag-a-long.

_“Unlikely. The security on the windows is not up to the standard of the door.”_

No doubt the builders weren’t expecting junior researchers to be so desperate to get into the executive washroom that they’d be willing to climb up the side of the building. But as it was only a one-story drop, getting out that way would be simple. “We’ll have to restrain her, then.” Well, they’d brought duct tape for its versatility, after all, even if the thought of tying up a civilian woman sat very badly with him.

On the other hand, she was a civilian woman likely complicit in a cover-up of whatever might be the reason for Tony’s death. Not exactly an innocent – if true. If.

He jogged the short distance back down the hallway, put in the combination and entered the bathroom. Rhodey was still glaring at the malfunctioning minibar computer, while Meng looked rather exasperated. “Please, sir, we have full amenities on offer in – ”

“Ms. Meng?” Steve interrupted her, although he tried to be polite about it. He was probably failing, he mused, as he moved into a grabbing reach – _his_ grabbing reach, which was beyond the range that most people would consider threatening. One of the creepier benefits of enhanced speed. In his peripheral vision he saw Rhodey straighten up and shift into a looser stance, ready to back him up, and some part of him relaxed while some _other_ part tied itself further up in knots. Steve did his best to ignore both.

“I’m afraid the colonel and I need to take a look around these facilities, and we really need you to not be wandering around or alerting Mr. Lu while we do that,” he explained apologetically, concealing a wince at the flash of uncertainty, and then fear, that crossed her face. “I’m really sorry about this, but we’re, um, going to need to restrain you, just while we take a look around in the building – we’ll leave you here in the washroom, completely safe – ”

He was the least reassuring kidnapper ever – was that the word he was looking for? Hostage-taker? No, she wasn’t a _hostage_ , he wouldn’t do that. Well, whatever he was, he was bad at being reassuring, Steve decided, as Meng opened her mouth, drawing in enough breath to scream. Whether or not it would have done any good, given the sound-dampening in the walls of the washroom, Steve didn’t pause to find out; at the same moment Rhodey started to move, so did Steve, and he got there first, grabbing Meng in a choke-hold. It was one that Natasha had taught him, which cut off blood flow to the brain temporarily; she collapsed into his arms, and he released the hold, catching her easily - she was tiny compared to him, even more so than most women.

Carefully, he laid her out on the floor, retrieving the small roll of duct tape from his pocket – and Rhodey’s phone, which he tossed back to the man. The tape was thin enough that he had to use several strips to be able to cover her mouth fully. By the time he was done, he was thankful to notice that she was beginning to rouse – he hadn’t done her any serious damage. Not that he’d had much doubt of that, but it was always risky knocking somebody unconscious. Before she could start struggling, he flipped her over and taped her hands together behind her back, then taped her feet together.

By now she was fully awake, so he rolled her over – gently, blushing slightly as her pencil skirt rode up a bit – and propped her against the wall, at an angle that wouldn’t put any pressure on her hands. “I am really, really sorry about this,” he apologized. “Really. Um, I’ll make sure you get compensated by the company, okay?” Her eyes were wide with fear; she was making squeaking noises behind the duct tape gag. “We’re not going to hurt you,” he assured her again belatedly. He probably should have started with that one after she woke up bound and gagged – oh, God. “Sorry.”

He rummaged through her pockets, blushing more as he did so, and relieved her of the keycard he’d seen and another that he hadn’t, as well as her phone – it might not be up to _his_ phone’s standards, but if JARVIS could get a connection through it then it might still prove useful. He tossed it to Rhodey.

While Steve had been taping up Meng, Rhodey had pulled out a tiny screwdriver and taken off the back cover of his own phone, doing something to the interior that caused it to finally restart. Now he pulled out a cable and hooked the two phones together, before looking apologetically at Meng and assuring her, “We’re really not going to hurt you, ma’am, and we’ll make sure you get found soon enough.” He managed to sound much more reassuring about it than Steve had. Maybe it was because Rhodey had a good fifteen years of command experience on him, and a hell of a lot more time dealing with civilians besides. Or maybe it was just because Steve couldn’t talk to women, tied up or otherwise.

The whine from the bar computer cut out about then, thankfully, JARVIS shutting it off belatedly. It left behind a ringing silence, in which Steve grimaced awkwardly as he carefully backed away from Meng. She was breathing hard and fast through her nose, looking completely terrified, which... he deserved, but he still winced. “Sorry,” he apologized to her again.  

Rhodey grunted at something on the two phones, and disconnected them, shoving the cable back into his pocket and tossing Meng’s to Steve. “Let’s go.”

 _“Ms. Meng’s phone isn’t up to the standard of Mr. Stark’s custom models, but it will suffice; I’ve rerouted control of your comm. into it,”_ JARVIS informed him as they left.Behind them, the electronic lock clicked into place, and without needing to be prompted JARVIS added, _“I’ve placed this door on an isolated lockdown, to be released automatically after four hours, or sooner if you so desire.”_

“Thanks,” Steve told him.

They retraced their steps to the atrium quickly, although not hurriedly; the hallways were empty but there were open doors leading off of some of them, and they didn’t want anybody to notice that they’d lost Ms. Meng. _“The door on the right should lead to the basement structure,”_ JARVIS told them. _“Records state its electronic lock has been removed and replaced with a permanent padlock.”_

Records, Steve thought as he eyed the heavily reinforced door, were definitely wrong. He kept an eye on the main glass doors – and specifically, the security guards standing beyond them – while Rhodey inspected the security setup. “Handprint, retinal scan, and passcode,” he reported after a moment. “Shit. Tony wasn’t messing around. If this is his, JARVIS, can you still hack it once I give you a connection?”

_“I can but try.”_

“It can’t be his personal work,” Steve said, “If he had the time to be building security systems he wouldn’t be contracting out whatever this is in the first place.”

“You’re assuming he didn’t already have a system ready for fab,” Rhodey said, pulling out a few more tools from his coat pocket. “Heads up, captain, agent. This is definitely going to set off an alarm.” He paused, though, waiting, just until a double-click came down the line – the affirmative from Natasha.

Here went nothing, then.

The alarm turned out to be a wailing siren that seemed to echo from every hallway in the building, so loud that it was physically painful. Steve grit his teeth at the sound and ignored the urge to clap his hands over his ears, instead pulling his shield out of its carry-case on his back and sliding it onto his arm. The siren soon stopped, mercifully, to be replaced by a loud voice stating something in Chinese. Whether because he was distracted hacking the system, or because he didn’t deem it important, JARVIS didn’t bother to translate it – although Steve didn’t need to know what was being said to get the gist. Elsewhere in the building, doors slammed, but there were no sounds of running footsteps – so it was a lockdown, and not an evacuation.

This was borne out by the guards at the door rushing in as the alarm repeated, starting again with the siren. The guards weren’t carrying guns, but Steve didn’t bother waiting to find out if they’d been armed with something more creative from the Stark Industries arsenal; instead he rushed them, picking up the first one through the door and tossing him two of his coworkers behind him. They fell over, the sound oddly silenced, completely drowned out by the siren. The fourth guard, still on his feet, pulled a tiny black box out of his pocket, and Steve threw his shield to knock it out of the man’s hand before he could find out what it did. It broke the guard’s fingers, eliciting a silent cry of pain, and Steve barely held himself back from yelling at Rhodey to hurry up.

The alarm cut off again – and wasn’t replaced by a recorded speech, this time. “We’re in!” Rhodey called from behind him; Steve caught his shield on the rebound and ran for the door, which was hissing slowly open. Even as he reached it JARVIS reversed the process – Rhodey was already through – and it began to close. The fourth guard, cradling his wrist, ran for the gap, and tried to jam his foot in to stop it, but it was inexorable; after a few seconds, the guard’s face creased in pain, and Steve had to reach down and shove the man’s foot free before it got crushed. Painfully slow, the door finished closing, and there was the sound of multiple deadbolts slamming home. The guard hammered on the other side of it, but made only extremely muted _thuds_.

Satisfied that they were secure, at least for now – even if they’d just blown their chances at investigating anywhere else covertly – Steve turned to inspect rest of the hallway. Rhodey had already done so, drawing one of the handguns he’d brought with him, a weapon that Steve was willing to bet was just as customized as Natasha’s twin pistols.

 _“Blocking the intra-net wide alert,”_ JARVIS announced.

The hallway itself was boring: concrete ceiling, walls, and floor, with bright fluorescent lights and speakers bolted into the ceiling; the door they’d just passed through had a metal plate fixed in the roof above it. There were seven other doors, one at the far end – about thirty yards down – and three on either side, placed asymmetrically. All had keypads beside them. At the end of the hallway, on the right side, was an elevator; this, too, had a keypad beside it. The walls were completely bare, free of even the usual marks left over from construction. None of the doors had windows in them.  Their footsteps on concrete were the only sounds aside from the faint hum of the lights. All the concrete gave it a feeling of cold sterility – a feeling reinforced by the faint smell of antiseptic cleaning solution.

_“If you wouldn’t mind wiring me into the security, Colonel Rhodes...”_

“Yeah, on it,” Rhodey replied, holstering his gun in favour of pulling out his screwdriver, swiftly taking apart the keypad of the door nearest on the left. Steve walked down and pressed his ear against the door closest on the right, but he couldn’t hear anything; when he carefully tried the handle, he found that, as expected, it was locked. “Steve, phone?”

His name sounded strangely personal, coming from Rhodey. Thus far on the mission he’d been calling him ‘Captain’. Why were they back to first names? Steve handed over Meng’s phone, and tried another door.

Natasha’s comm. clicked on. _“ – appears that there has been a security break-in. Please excuse me.”_ That was Lu – so somebody had managed to inform him despite JARVIS sitting on the network.

 _“On today, of all days?”_ Natasha sounded disapproving.

 _“There is enough storage space within this system for me to seed a skeleton program of myself,”_ JARVIS reported flatly. Steve barely stopped himself from trying to look up in surprise at his tone. JARVIS didn’t live in the ceilings of Stark Tower, and he certainly didn’t live in the ceiling of this building; Steve wouldn’t be able to see his expression no matter where he looked. _“Doing so will speed up infiltration considerably. Initiating copy...”_

“Can you get us a layout of this place?” Rhodey asked.

_“I’ve downloaded a map to your phone.”_

_“ – security protocols are up to task – ”_ Lu was still justifying himself to Natasha; he hadn’t yet realized he should turn the tables on her. 

Rhodey pulled out a roll of duct tape like Steve’s and secured the wiring on Meng’s phone, before pulling out his own; Steve abandoned his attempt to listen through doors and went to look at it as well. Although the phones didn’t have 3D capability ( _yet_ , Tony had always stressed, it was only _yet_ – give him another few years, hell, a few months if only he had enough free time, and he’d get there – but he never would now) they could project crystal-clear 2D images, and the concrete wall made a decent enough screen.

“ _Damn_ ,” Rhodey muttered, looking at the images. Steve had to agree. “JARVIS, you’re grabbing all this, right?”

_“As swiftly as possible.”_

The complex itself was a full twenty stories deep; they were only on the first. The top four levels contained labs – _enormous_ labs, larger than the ones at the top of Stark Tower – and living quarters, although there was no information on the prints indicating who was living there. The elevator well extended down another fifteen stories below that, to a smaller, secondary set of two-story labs. Lines ran into those, labelled with various reactor numbers – up to five, and only one labelled as an arc reactor. The details for the reactors themselves were missing.

“He must’ve been working on this for years,” Rhodey said softly.

“The scientists only went missing a few months ago.”

The background conversation in their ears shifted. _“ – caused by Colonel Rhodes and Captain Rogers – ”_

“So he built a secret lair for some other reason and repurposed it,” Rhodey grimaced and shook his head. “This didn’t get built in six months, not without the entire Park knowing about it. Not this deep, and especially not in a city at sea level. JARVIS, what’re the outer shells?” He traced the outside wall on the side-view schematic.

A long pause, and then, _“I am unable to locate that information. It appears that most of the information relating to the security and construction of this complex is stored elsewhere. I have retrieved a list of the current residents, however, and it is a close match Agent Barton’s list, with a few exceptions. No mention is made of Dr. Gina Dyson, and there are two additions: Dr. Ralph Roberts and Dr. Igor Drenkov. I am researching their backgrounds now.”_ Another pause. _“Copy complete; unpacking skeleton program... There is another discrepancy: Dr. Alex Nevsky and Dr. Chen Lu are listed as deceased as of three days ago.”_

Nevsky – the Russian materials engineer. Lu was the radiation specialist. Had something malfunctioned? “Cause of death?”

The pause this time was hesitation, not a delay. _“It has been – ”_

The lights winked out at the same time as and JARVIS was cut off, leaving the hallway lit only by the projection from Rhodey’s phone. For a moment, everything was silent, even Natasha’s conversation with Lu, and then the lights flickered back on. The comms did not. Unexpectedly, JARVIS instead spoke from the speakers in the hallway rather than their earpieces, _“Emergency lockdown procedures initiated.”_

That was all the warning they got before something triggered in the roof above the entry-way door, and what Steve had thought was just a metal plate fell out, dropping a solid steel block at least three feet thick in front of the door with such a _bang_ that both he and Rhodey jumped.

“JARVIS?” Rhodey was poking at his phone. “What’s up, man?”

There was a full three-second delay, and then, _“Query not understood,”_ JARVIS replied in a monotone. _“Please restate.”_

Rhodey did a double-take, the movement matching Steve’s own. “JARVIS?” But there was no reply this time. “Agent Romanoff?” That didn’t get a reply either.

“Cutting power shouldn’t have done anything to him,” Steve said, his voice inflecting up at the end and making it a question despite himself. He tried his own comm., too – “Natasha? Can you read us?” No reply. “Natasha?”

Rhodey waved a hand to hush him. “JARVIS, command: run self-diag basic A, authorization James Rhodes, twenty-three ninety-four thirty sixty-seven, mike-india-tango nine-zero.”

 _“Authorization accepted,”_ JARVIS said, still speaking in a monotone. _“Beginning self diagnostic. System name JARVIS Skele-form, running on SI chain-core-thirty-two array alpha two. Average memory usage in ten-second period: one-point-three-two terabytes. Write restriction authorization limited to system administer: JARVIS. No errors found.”_

As JARVIS reported in, Rhodey keyed out of the map and into his phone settings, fiddling with them. “We’ve lost the signal,” he announced.

“What? How? These phones work anywhere.” The same rant Tony had given him about the uselessness of a phone that could be damaged by rain had included an entire sub-rant on the stupidity of phones that stopped working underground – and they weren’t even that far underground here. 

_“Query not understood. Please restate.”_

“Ugh – command done, JARVIS,” Rhodey grimaced. “There must be something jamming us – phones, comms, everything. This isn’t JARVIS, it’s just the skeleton version of his program that he downloaded. Not him. Not alive,” he clarified.

Steve wasn’t so sure about that – but on the other hand, it had been JARVIS who had set up the program; he must have known what he was doing. “Can you boost transmission at all?” he asked instead. Rhodey had managed to turn his phone into an EMP device, after all...

...but Rhodey shook his head. “This is already optimized for reception. Anything I could do would only fuck it up worse. Nope, we’re stuck down here for now. At least we got an ally in the system. Just make sure you specify when you’re giving him a command, and when you’re not.” He smiled humourlessly, and started un-taping Meng’s phone and removing the wires from it.

Damn it. Well, at least Natasha could be counted on to take care of herself. Steve grimaced, and tried experimentally, “JARVIS, what was the cause of Nevsky’s and Lu’s deaths?”

_“You are not authorized to access that information.”_

“Authorization Captain Steve Rogers, thirty-four, forty-four, fifty-four, sixty-four.”

_“Authorization confirmed. You are not authorized to access that information.”_

“Who would have access?” Rhodey asked, as he put away the phones and tools again.

_“You are not authorized to access that information.”_

“Yeah, we get it,” Rhodey muttered. “Want to see what’s behind door number one?”

_“Query not understood. Please re-”_

“Never mind, JARVIS.”

Steve brought his shield up as Rhodey drew his handgun, standing to take up a position opposite Steve. “JARVIS, unlock the door,” Steve ordered.

There was a low thud as the lock slid free, and then Steve turned the handle and rushed in, shield first. It was a lab, more akin to Bruce’s than Tony’s, dominated by arcane machines and lacking the heaps of random parts that were always lying about Tony’s workshop. Part of one wall was dedicated to mouse cages, far more than the few that Bruce kept – many were empty, but there were a few occupied, enough to layer the faint odour of feed, piss, and feces underneath the lemony antiseptic, despite the vent right over top of the cages . A nitrogen-filled closed-lab was beside them, the gloves sticking out creepily, holding stacks of samples stored in carefully arrayed tubes. A glass wall divided off another portion of the room, and behind it ran racks of computer equipment, blinking with lights; Steve recognized the temperature-controlled setup that the Tower labs used to house supercomputers.

The 3D holograms, projected into the ‘office’ subsection of the lab, were unmistakeably Tony’s. A woman was standing in the middle of them, fifteen feet away from Steve, looking at him with a her lips slightly parted in a flattened ‘O’. Greying brown hair, lab coat – the light scar on her left cheek was new, and she was paler than she had been in her profile’s photos, but she was still easily recognizable. As Steve turned to face her Rhodey turned as well, in the opposite direction, guarding his back; they finished sweeping the lab for any other personnel, finding no one else. Although that made sense – there were certainly enough labs in this place for all of the resident scientists to have their own.

“Hello, Dr. Hansen,” Steve greeted her.

“Who are you?” she demanded. Her eyes flicked between the shield and Steve’s face – and yes, that was recognition there. She was in the business of human enhancement, after all.

“Maya,” Rhodey nodded a hello, ignoring her question. He took out his phone and thumbed it to video, grabbing footage of the equipment in the room.

“Do I know you?” Hansen turned her gaze to him, her eyes narrowing.

“We met once, back in ’95,” Rhodey said. “Tony introduced us.” His tone there was _very_ delicate, and something about the way he said it, in the presence of a lady, made it seem far more suspect than it had back on the plane. ‘Introduced’ – what did that mean, “had  _fondue_ with”? Steve had heard stories about Tony’s younger, wilder days – many of them from Rhodey himself.

“You’re his friend,” she realized, prompted. More holograms had been appearing around her, as the system rebooted from the power loss; now she started closing them and shuffling them off to the side, out of sight. So she guessed that Rhodey might have a chance at understanding whatever the hell it was she was working on, then. “The military one – Rhodey.”

“Yeah. You wanna tell us about what you’re working on, here?”

“Those are corporate secrets,” Hansen said. Her poker-face was perfect.

“Bullshit.”

Hansen didn’t say anything.

“JARVIS, can you download a copy of everything here to an external drive?” Rhodey said after a long moment.

 _“Command accepted. Copying,”_ JARVIS droned.

“You got JARVIS back,” Hansen said in surprise. “That wasn’t a recording.” She frowned. “And he trusts you.”

“Dr. Hansen, we’re Tony’s friends,” Steve said, stepping forward – closer to her – and away from Rhodey. Good cop, bad cop – oldest trick in the book, but he didn’t think Rhodey was using it intentionally right now. Hopefully it wouldn’t be a problem later. Rhodey turned away, pocketing his phone and going over to one of the computers to open up a program Steve didn’t recognize instead.

Hansen’s eyes followed him, and she said bluntly, “Tony’s dead.”

 “And we’re the people who get to recommend to Ms. Potts which of his personal projects should continue getting funding.” Not quite a lie. Although no doubt SHIELD would be happy to take over funding, if they thought she was working on something useful.

“If that was true you wouldn’t have broken in here with guns,” Hansen explained patiently, as if to someone who was very stupid.

Steve tossed a glance at Rhodey, but he was busy frowning at whatever he’d found on his screen. Hansen shuffled off the last of her holograms and walked over to another screen, hitting a few keys; Rhodey’s went dark, and he looked up and glared at her. “JARVIS, override that.”

 _“Command accepted. Overriding.”_ The monotone was almost irritating.

“Right before Tony died, something happened,” Steve said, borrowing a tactic from Natasha. Time to give some information to get some. “JARVIS was damaged, the SI computers were damaged – we don’t know what happened. He left messages for us, but we don’t know what they said. We don’t know what he would have wanted done.”

Hansen rolled her eyes, and went over to something that looked like a fridge, opening the door and sticking her head inside; her voice was a bit muffled until Steve moved nearer, so that her head wasn’t blocked by the door. “He’s a pragmatist – if you knew him, you’d know that. He was doing exactly what he wanted done.”

Was he? The hologram – that hadn’t looked like he’d been doing anything he _wanted_ to do... rather, something he felt he _had_ to do. Something that called for him to embezzle money from himself, build a secret underground lair, and spring a bunch of mad scientists from jail.

How had he missed the fact that Tony had been going crazy?

“So tell us what that was,” he invited Hansen.

Slowly, reluctantly, she shut the fridge, turning around to lean against it instead, her arms crossed. In his peripheral vision he saw the change in how the fabric fell around the left pocket in her lab coat, but he didn’t look down to check it – he didn’t need to, anyway; one of the more interesting side-effects of the serum (or so some of the scientists had claimed) was the new clarity of his peripheral vision. But she’d definitely pocketed something – likely a sample. What was she planning on doing with that?

“The betterment of the human race,” she said after a moment, her head tilted slightly to one side. “The human body is an efficient machine, within its limitations – but there are so _many_ limitations. It gets sick. It ages. It turns upon itself and summons up malfunctions, if external influences don’t wreck it first. It’s preloaded with genetic disorders, timebombs waiting to go off. But with the technology we have now, a panacea is possible. If we could reprogram the human body, the way we can reprogram any machine – we could fix _everything_.”

A lofty goal. That she’d committed murder in her pursuit of it cast a pall in Steve’s mind over her obvious enthusiasm.

There was a discreet _beep_ from one of the other machines; Hansen turned to it, reached around to unhook something, but Rhodey crossed around the table and batted her hand away with a firm, “No.”

Hansen’s left hand dipped into her pocket and came up holding a syringe. Steve tore the shield from his arm – but he wouldn’t be fast enough, not with the relative distances involved – _damn_ it, he should have done the same as Rhodey and kept her from doing anything. But Rhodey drew his hand back, quickly, and the needle glanced off the cuff of his jacket; with his right he reached under and grabbed her wrist, twisting it up and around until she cried out in pain, forced to go along with the movement or suffer a dislocation. The syringe fell to the floor, Rhodey not attempting to catch it with his bare hands, and shattered, scattering liquid silver across the tile floor.

The extremis enhancile.

Hansen showed no fear; there was only pain and resentment on her face, and something that looked almost like jealousy, which combined with what worry she showed to make Steve think that her only concern was for her project. And sure enough, the next words that she spoke, still caught in Rhodey’s lock, were, “You can’t shut this program down. You _can’t_ – you don’t know how much time Tony spent on this, this is going to _change the world_.”

“And what’s the current survival rate for your test subjects?” Rhodey asked softly.

She tried to glare at him, but the lock he had her in kept her from facing him head-on. “Infinitely better than it was six months ago. We’ve overcome almost all the major hurdles – we are _so close_. You shut this down, you’re throwing the last six months of your friend’s life away.”

“He did that all on his own,” Rhodey muttered, pulling her in closer and retrieving the other samples that she’d had in her pocket, before letting her go. “JARVIS, neutralize that sample on the floor.”

Steve grimaced. Hearing it put like that... he knew what Rhodey meant, but it still ate at him. Had Tony been lying for the entire last half year? He couldn’t have been, right? Even if he was concealing what he was up to, he was still the same person.

Right?

 _“Command accepted,”_ JARVIS droned.

Rhodey stepped in closer, crowding Hansen away from the computer they were both standing beside, and reached for the same thing that she’d been going for – a hard drive, Steve identified, after Rhodey pulled it. He tucked it away into an inner pocket of his jacket, although it was large enough that it made an awkward-looking bulge.

“Where are the other scientists?” Steve asked Hansen.

“It’s a security lockdown,” she explained, as if to somebody very slow of wit. “They’re _locked down._ ” She rubbed at her wrist and shot Rhodey a resentful glare.

“What happened to Lu and Nevsky?”

“Who’s Lu?” Was that a lie? He wished he could read her better, but all of her emotions seemed to be tied up worrying about her research, leaving her with no concern for any _actual_ human beings.

Lie or not, it _was_ a deflection. “And Nevsky?”

“Stroke.” She shrugged. “He was dead before he hit the floor. Case in point.”

Lu and Nevsky hadn’t _both_ died of strokes at the same time. But if Hansen didn’t know – if that knowledge had been kept from her… Rhodey caught his eye and shook his head slightly, letting a trace of worry show through. Hansen caught the movement and frowned at him.

“Go search her quarters,” Rhodey told Steve, eyeing her right back. “I’ll keep an eye on her.”

_“Query not understood. Please – ”_

“Not talking to you, JARVIS.”

He wasn’t sure he wanted to leave Rhodey alone with her – or rather, her alone with Rhodey – but... Steve forced himself to cut off that line of thinking. Rhodey was a professional, and was probably going to be his teammate soon enough; he needed to trust him during missions. And regardless of what had happened to the two dead scientists, they certainly couldn’t leave Hansen locked in her own lab while they went looking for the others.

(“First rule of thumb,” Tony had told them all once, when Clint – irritated over something or other that Tony had done to him – had escalated their informal prank war to the point of supergluing Tony’s workshop door shut. Steve had only found about this after the fact – up until then, he’d been trying to figure out why Tony had been mad enough at him to lock him out of the lab for four days straight. Then one morning at breakfast, the building had shaken slightly, putting everyone on edge, until Tony had showed up in the kitchen wearing welding goggles, covered in soot, wielding something that looked like a light sabre, and grinning like a lunatic. Clint had taken one look at him and vanished. “Never lock MacGyver in a storage closet!”

The resultant amount of mediating that he’d had to do kept Steve from ever getting around to finding out who MacGyver was, but he understood the general principle.)

According to the maps that Rhodey had projected on his phone, quarters were located beside the lab, so he went next door and got JARVIS to unlock the door for him. A quick, cursory search turned up no computers, not even a tablet – although he supposed they could have been built into the walls. “Are there any computers in here?”

_“Affirmative.”_

Damn.

“What and where?”

_“Speaker components have been installed in the – ”_

“Are there any computers in Dr. Hansen’s quarters that she has control over or can use?” Steve interrupted him.

_“Negative.”_

“Does she have authorization to unlock doors either Colonel Rhodes or I order locked?”

_“Negative.”_

Well, then. He took a quick look through the attached bathroom, but turned up nothing other than the usual feminine and hygiene supplies, which he did his best not to touch even as he moved them out of the way to check the rest of the contents of the drawers. Nonetheless, he felt like an unwelcome intruder – no doubt Natasha or Clint would have rolled their eyes at his embarrassment, but for all that he’d run covert ops back in the war, not many of them had involved needing to investigate a lady’s bath.

He returned to her lab, where Rhodey and Hansen were still watching each other warily, neither willing to look away long enough to use the computers. Stand-off. “It’s clear,” Steve reported, looking at Rhodey but paying careful attention to Hansen’s expression – but if she was feeling triumphant at getting something past him, she didn’t let it show.

_“Query not understood. Please restate.”_

Steve gritted his teeth and ignored JARVIS.

“Then that’s where you’ll be staying,” Rhodey told Hansen.

“Fine,” she huffed, walking over to another table to grab a stack of paper – printouts of _something_ , although Steve couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

“Without that.”

“But then there’s nothing – you can’t imprison me,” she protested.

“Since you’re supposed to be serving life in Rikers, I think you’ll find that yeah, actually, we can,” Rhodey said dryly.

Still nursing her wrist – although Steve was beginning to think that she was doing it only to try to get sympathy – she reluctantly let them escort her to her rooms. Steve just hoped that they weren’t making a huge mistake in leaving her alone at all. “Lock the door and don’t let her open it until Colonel Rhodes or I authorizes it,” Steve told JARVIS, once he’d shut the door behind her. “And tell us if she leaves her rooms somehow. Actually, tell us if anybody not us opens a door.”

Rhodey nodded once in approval of this addition, and then sighed. “Human enhancement. And he was working on it personally.” He shook his head and swore. “ _Damn_ it, Tony.”

Bad enough he’d been funding sociopaths – but he’d been working with her, too? What the hell had scared him so badly? Steve had thought it was Asgard – they’d all thought it was Asgard – but Tony had thrown down with Fury about Phase II – why was he willing to investigate something even _worse_ , and something cooked up by the worst type of person possible?

And then there was the question of Lu and Nevsky, which even thinking about made Steve feel like he’d swallowed a ball of slime.

“She didn’t know what happened to Lu and Nevsky,” he forced himself to say. “The details were kept from her.”

_“You are not authorized to access that information.”_

“He isn’t talking to you, either, JARVIS. You’re jumping to the worst conclusion, Steve,” Rhodey said quietly. Something dark stirred behind his eyes.

“He took a bunch of criminal scientists and put them to work on his secret projects. You think he wouldn’t have security? How far would he go?” It wasn’t just a rhetorical question. Steve had spent hours in Tony’s workshop, spent hours listening to him invent, listening to him talking to himself – but he’d missed when Tony had despaired enough to take his own life. Rhodey might not have been around as often recently, but he’d known Tony for decades. If he thought Tony wouldn’t –

Rhodey looked away, and said, “We’re here to get information. Putting it all together comes later.”

Steve’s stomach sank further. He nodded.

“If the labs are grouped by purpose, then the next one down should be Borjigin,” Rhodey went on. “The only one in this place who hasn’t yet done something worth twenty-to-life. So let’s go get some answers.”

At Steve’s order, JARVIS unlocked the door to the next lab; Steve led the entrance again, shield at the ready with Rhodey covering his back once more. The scientist occupying this one was a man just entering middle age, one who hadn’t bothered wearing a lab coat; rather, he was wearing a plain grey t-shirt. He looked up over his shoulder from a four-screen setup when the door opened.

“Ah, hello,” he said, his eyes widening as he raised his hands in a sign of surrender, turning his chair about further. His English had a slight British accent to it, but no trace of any other.

“Dr. Borjigin,” Steve said, sweeping the rest of the lab. There was no one else. It was even more ordered than Hansen’s lab, with more monitors and no mouse cages.

“That’s me,” Borjigin replied cautiously, starting to lower his hands back into his lap. “Uh – Captain _Rogers_? And Colonel Rhodes,” so he could recognize them both. Steve shot a glance at Rhodey, but didn’t get a nod in reply; so Rhodey didn’t know they’d met, if they had. “Well, I suppose it’s not too surprising that you’d come by here, given recent… events.” The last words were said _very_ delicately. He tilted his head. “Are you here as Tony’s friends, or as representatives of your Initiative?”

“That depends on what we find,” Rhodey told him.

Steve added, “We’d like it to be the former.”

“Right,” Borgijin said, folding his hands in his lap. “Well, if you’re down here at this end of the hall, you probably already ran into Maya.” He grimaced at their expressions. “Please, before you judge what she may have told you – she’s a gifted scientist, a brilliant woman, but she does have difficulty with… people, both practically and theoretically. And she was very upset to hear about Tony’s death – it’s been affecting her badly. But the technology she’s worked on has considerable merit. This could be lifesaving, life-improving technology, for billions of people.” He looked at them earnestly.

“So why does he have you working on it in a secret underground bunker? It doesn’t exactly scream ‘good intentions’.”

“Captain, only a few months ago aliens attacked his research base in New York,” Borjigin explained. “The scientists who work on curing Ebola, who wiped out smallpox – they did so in highly secured environs. This is something that could potentially cure every illness, every disease that ever existed. It’s correspondingly more dangerous.”

“There’s a difference between keeping something secure, and keeping it off the books.”

Borjigin sighed and held up his hands, this time in a gesture of defeat. “True. Honestly, I don’t know why Tony shrouded this project in secrecy – I think, until his death, I hadn’t realized just how completely he had done so.” He looked at them both thoughtfully. “Both Maya and I worked with him closely, but all of our conversation revolved around the project. Perhaps he simply did not trust his government. The origin of that nuclear missile that he diverted through that wormhole still has not been officially discovered, after all.”

For a moment, Steve felt doubt course through him. Tony did _everything_ over the top – was it so difficult to imagine that he’d build a secret underground science bunker after a government agency had nearly obliterated New York? He’d challenged the WSC in no uncertain terms over that, through Fury – and while the WSC hadn’t _seemed_ to make a move against him since, it was not such a reach to think that they’d try. Justified paranoia, wealth… if he wanted protection from – or, Heaven help them all, a weapon against – the WSC, of course he’d need scientists that he could keep off the books, ones he could put in debt to himself and control…

Steve halted his thoughts, feeling sick that he’d let them get so far. Tony wasn’t that sort of man. If he had resorted to such questionable actions as they’d uncovered so far, he had a better reason for it than simple paranoia.

“What about Lu and Nevsky?”

“Which Lu?” Borjigin smiled thinly, glancing between them. “Yes, I’m aware of who Tony Stark’s hand is, in this part of the world. Unlike some of us in here, I do attempt to keep up with outside news.” Even more than that – he knew there was more than one. He knew about the other scientists here.

“The one who died of a ‘stroke’,” Rhodey elaborated for Steve.

“Ah.” Borjigin laced his fingers together and stared down at them contemplatively. “I assume, gentlemen, that you know where Maya has spent the last seven years of her life. The others I have met here have… similar backgrounds. I am of the opinion, one that I believe Tony shared, that they do nobody any good locked away, unable to contribute, to make amends for their crimes. I am still undecided whether or not Tony was acting morally.” He smiled apologetically, a line of pain behind it. “I tell myself that the ends will justify the means.”

“And Lu and Nevsky?” Rhodey asked, while Steve bit his tongue. If he never heard that phrase again, it would be too soon.

“Given opportunities to make amends or not, they are – were – still murderers who couldn’t be trusted. I imagine… moral or otherwise… that Tony took measures to ensure they did not break the terms of their parole. But when JARVIS vanished, several days ago… Alex, at least, seemed to think it was an opportunity. He didn’t realize that he was really throwing away the best opportunity he’d ever have. I told him he shouldn’t leave, but he and Gregor were both hot-headed, and they started talking to Chen down in the GRC – the gamma research centre,” he elaborated, “I don’t have access, but Alex’s work sometimes took him down there. And, well. I imagine they attempted to leave. I found Alex motionless on the floor in the hallway outside a few hours later – I called for a medic, of course, but there was nothing they could do. The next time I spoke to Gregor he told me that Chen had been found in the hallway outside the GRC in the same way.”

Jesus.

Tony had actually done it.

No. No, Steve couldn’t think – it wasn’t proof. They didn’t know Borjigin, couldn’t trust him – somebody had killed Lu and Nevsky, that was plain enough, but it could just as easily have been somebody on the inside. It could have been Borjigin himself.

Rhodey walked over to one of the computers a bit further into the lab and stared at its screen with such intensity that Steve doubted he was actually seeing it. He couldn’t blame him. Speaking was an effort; he had to clear his throat, first, to be able to talk. The air tasted like antiseptic, chemical and sour. “How does the extremis enhancile work?”

“At the moment? It doesn’t,” Borjigin shrugged. “The concept is that the nanomachines will integrate with the human body and be able to rewrite it at the cellular level. If a cell is damaged, or faulty, they can take it apart and reconstruct it. The nanomachines can be self-replicating, to continue to provide protection, or else just pass out of the body naturally.”

“So what’s the problem with it?” Rhodey asked, his voice only slightly hoarse.

“Integration with the biological system. Getting cells torn apart is traumatic, not to mention that the immune system doesn’t like all those foreign bodies floating about. Right now it’s killing most of the lab mice Maya tests it on – most, but not all. We’ve made huge strides – Gregor and Alex have been working on the coatings for months, and I think they’re close to making a breakthrough, there. Tony rewrote an enormous part of the software from the ground up – I had no idea he was such a genius at computer engineering until he introduced JARVIS. Everyone focuses on his weapons systems, his energy work…” Borjigin shook his head. “He implemented a basic evolutionary structure, so that the samples adapt to work with their host, more, giving Maya and I an actual chance at getting the DNA matching to work out. But… it’s been tricky. We can’t change the initial DNA of the subject - well, not yet, anyway – and the enhancile is still too inflexible in its parameters.” He steepled his fingers and touched them to his lips, pensively. “The evolutionary coding can’t evolve fast enough.”

“What other projects are based here besides extremis?”

“Only the GRC, but what they get up to down there… I have no idea.” He spread his hands apologetically. “It’s all very outside of my area of expertise, no matter what Drenkov might think.” His expression twisted with some distaste.

“What’s Drenkov doing?”

“Trying to make another you.” Borjigin nodded to Steve. “Tony thought his work had promise – so did I, when he first came in. But the man is delusional.”

Rhodey finished what he’d been doing on the computer, walking over to another and yanking the hard drive from it, too. It made for another bulky addition to his jacket. How much data could they carry out of here, if they couldn’t reconnect with JARVIS? The place had to be surrounded, and three-foot-thick blast doors or no… Steve chased those thoughts away. He had to trust that Natasha would call in SHIELD at the right moment to lift the siege; right now he needed to focus on the task at hand.

He exchanged a glance with Rhodey, then went to go search Borjigin’s quarters, while behind him Rhodey questioned the scientist further about extremis. His rooms were even more Spartan than Hansen’s, and kept neater than a military barracks. Steve wondered who did the cleaning. Medical staff had access, it seemed – another avenue to look into – but it seemed unlikely that they’d let in a janitor. More likely they just had a bunch of robots. It was hard to imagine either Hansen or Borjigin taking the time to their bathrooms, if they were half as obsessive about their work as Tony.

“They’re clear,” he reported back to Rhodey.

“Don’t want to leave a scientist alone in their own lab?” Borjigin smiled crookedly. “Given Tony’s rather… breathtaking… example, I suppose I can’t blame you.” Like Hansen, he went to pick up a pile of paper reports.

“Leave those,” Rhodey told him.

Borjigin sighed. “I don’t suppose I could talk you into at least letting me have some blank paper? Otherwise I might be reduced to scribbling on the walls.”

Rhodey pulled a stack from a machine that Steve had failed to realize was a printer, flipped through it casually, and handed it to Borjigin, who also nabbed a few multi-coloured pens. He was already scribbling things down as he followed Steve – Rhodey following them up in turn – and let them lock him in his quarters, but he wasn’t completely oblivious; he looked up and shot them a salute before Steve shut the door on him and ordered it locked.

When they were once more alone in the hallway, Rhodey pulled up the blueprints that JARVIS had downloaded to his phone, and pointed out their current location and the next floor down. “Shapanka and Nevsky’s labs are here, according to Borjigin,” he pointed them out. “The lab space on the next two floors down haven’t been occupied that he knows of; the ones on three are being used for storage.” That they would need to check them all out anyway went unsaid, but it was ominous nonetheless. Had there been other scientists that Tony was looking at bringing in? “Quarters for Drenkov, Roberts,” he indicated the third sublevel, “Parks, and Lu,” were on the fourth.

The door to the third subbasement was cold. Steve felt the air chill as he got closer, and touched it only momentarily with the back of his wrist, the fabric of his sleeve pulled up around his hand, but even that brief contact was enough to convey how bone-shatteringly cold the metal was.

They retreated up the stairwell, out of the way of whatever might be on the other side, before Rhodey ordered, “JARVIS, open the door.”

_“Command accepted. Opening door.”_

There wasn’t any sound of mechanical movement below; after a half-minute, Steve cautiously checked, and the door was still closed. “JARVIS, the door’s not open.”

 _“Initiating diagnostic.”_ A pause. _“Mechanical failure detected.”_

“Shut down all power to this level,” Rhodey ordered, joining Steve on the landing.

_“Command accepted. Shutting down power…”_

“Wait. Will that shut down the air supply, too?”

_“Command postponed. You are not authorized to access that information.”_

“Is that likely?” Steve asked Rhodey.

_“Query not understood. Please restate.”_

“I don’t know. I’ve never built a secret underground base below sea-level.” Rhodey grimaced, frustrated. “JARVIS, power it down.”

_“Command accepted…”_

They waited for several minutes in tense silence. The lack of movement weighed on Steve – ‘hurry-up-and-wait’ had never been his favourite military tradition – going further down, and leaving a threat overhead – one that could potentially cut them off from a return to the surface – was unacceptable. Impatient, he checked the door several times, once nearly burning his wrist from the cold of it, but at last it seemed to begin to fade.

When they retreated up the stairs and ordered JARVIS to try opening it again, though, they got another, _“Mechanical failure detected…”_

“Time to do this Tony’s way,” Rhodey muttered, pulling out what looked like a pack of gum.

“He did _not_ ,” Steve said as Rhodey pulled out one of the sticks and unwrapped it, bending it in half a ninety-degree angle. That movie was Clint’s favourite thing to play while making breakfast.

“Of course he did,” Rhodey snorted, a ghost of a smile on his face as he stuck one half of the stick to the door carefully, his hands wrapped up in his jacket sleeves. “Might want to get back upstairs, Captain,” he said, and pushed the two halves together.

They sprinted up the stairwell, making it up one flight before pausing. Below, everything was silent.

“Are you sure those – ”

The door exploded. Heat washed up the well and over them – but surprisingly, not much of it; or maybe not so surprising, if Tony had designed it primarily for indoor use. It didn’t stop there; there were several secondary explosions, these ones louder, and strong enough that Steve wasn’t sure that the stairs didn’t shake. When they at last faded away he shook his head, ears ringing, and jogged back down with his shield in front of him. The other side of the door was considerably more damaged; evidently the explosion had somehow been directed inward.

The lights were off in the hallway, of course, but Steve didn’t need them to see; the stairwell provided enough light. It also backlit him terribly, so he stepped to one side as soon as he was through the door; Rhodey came behind him and took the other side, his gun pointed out into the dark with his supporting hand underneath holding a flashlight that Steve hadn’t seen him pull out.  

Cables and machinery had been wrecked, torn apart; he took in the scrapped remains of a pressurized canister, and another that he could only identify by the contextual clue of the first. Compressed gas – that explained the secondary explosions, but – “JARVIS, is this air safe to breathe?”

 _“Affirmative,”_ JARVIS droned immediately, and Steve let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

Coughing; further down the hall was a body, beginning to stir – Shapanka, then. He was surrounded by less damaged machinery. What had he been trying to do? If he wanted to blow the door off, surely it would have been easier to detonate an O2 tank beside it than… what, freeze it?

Or had he thought that the former method might give him a stroke?

_Damn it, Tony._

“Restore power, turn the lights on,” he ordered JARVIS, and jogged through the wreckage to reach the downed scientist. At a glance he didn’t seem too badly injured, just stunned; he was lucky he’d been far enough away. He batted at Steve’s hands, first feebly, and then with more strength as Steve checked him over, emptying his pockets in the process – he had no idea what half the things Shapanka was carrying with him actually _were_ , but he placed them out of reach for Rhodey to examine. By the time he was nearly done he had to pin Shapanka to keep him from squirming away.

“What the hell were you trying to do?” he demanded.

 _“Query not understood. Please restate.”_ Oh, for –

Shapanka spat at him in – it didn’t quite sound Russian. Hungarian? Whatever it was, Steve didn’t speak it. “JARVIS, translate that.”

 _“Query not understood. Please restate.”_ _Damn_ it.

He pulled out the duct tape and flipped Shapanka onto his back, taping his hands together before getting his feet. Then he picked him up by his collar and dragged him over to the room that Rhodey indicated – more personal quarters, although these ones looked like they’d been cleared out recently; there was no furniture. Nevsky’s, then? “It’s clear,” Rhodey told him.

Steve dumped Shapanka on the concrete floor and knelt over him, placing his left hand on the side of Shapanka’s head, flat against the concrete, and grabbing his hair with his right. Very gently – although it would not feel so to Shapanka – he pressed down, forcing the man’s face against the concrete. Memories of doing this in the War washed up, over him, and leant hatred to his voice as he snarled, “Who else was working with you?”

Shapanka broke like a china doll. Natasha would have a field day with him, when he got handed over – but there was no time for a proper interrogation now. “No one, no one,” Shapanka gasped, and there was the ring of honest fear in his voice. “Stark killed the others – no one else, I swear!”

Steve let him go and stood. For a long moment Rhodey just stared at him, before shaking his head; and then they both left, locking the door behind them.

“Steve,” Rhodey said, as soon as JARVIS confirmed the door locked.

He sighed, and headed down the hall through the wreckage to the doors to Shapanka’s lab. “It’s just interrogation, Rhodey.”

“You sure about that, Captain?” 

Was he? Maybe not.

“I’m fine,” he said firmly, and Rhodey caught up with him, nodded, accepting it.

He’d talk with Leo about it later.

They cased the labs quickly, Rhodey setting up downloads in each once he got the computers running again while Steve took video footage of the equipment. It didn’t look like anyone had packed up Nevsky’s lab; there were still papers haphazardly strewn across the desk of the main workstation, and a few old coffee mugs sitting around. The hard drives that Rhodey pulled got given to Steve to carry, Rhodey’s pockets being full, and he stuffed them into his shield case.

If sublevel four had any hidden secrets, neither of them found any, and JARVIS wasn’t inclined to give them up; not that Steve thought that this watered-down, pale image of JARVIS was likely capable of deceit. More likely it would have just repeated the tired old standby about authorization. The larger rooms were clearly set up to become labs, with non-standard vents and sockets, but among the tables bolted to the floor were stacked crates of supplies of spare lab supplies, freezers full of frozen food, and a few  robots with mechanical arms, which Rhodey couldn’t manage to turn on no matter what he tried. At least with all these supplies, they wouldn’t need to worry about SHIELD drawing out negotiations with Lu and the Chinese government. Now if only they had some way to convey that to Natasha.

The stairs ended at this level; the only remaining way down was the elevator. There was no standard button to call it, only the code entry, so when they’d finished checking out the level, Rhodey ordered, “JARVIS, bring the elevator to this level.”

_“You are not authorized to make that request.”_

They looked at each other, both trying to think of ways to ask for more information that wouldn’t get them that same response. “JARVIS, what usually happens to the elevator in a lock-down?” Rhodey asked after a few seconds.

_“Lockdown protocol calls for the termination of all elevator functions.”_

They both stared at the elevator door. “Odds that ‘termination’ involves an explosion?” Steve asked, trying for joking. The unfortunate reality of the suggestion made it fall rather flat.

“Command done, JARVIS,” Rhodey said absently, still considering the door. “It can’t be anything too permanent – it would have to be reversible _somehow_.” He sighed.

During the War, there hadn’t been much call for elevator-related shenanigans. Since coming out of the ice, the action movies that Clint almost obsessively watched during downtime informed Steve that what they were about to do was a very good way to get squished to death. On the other hand, anything that Tony had had a hand in building was unlikely to fail accidentally.

The keyword there being ‘accidentally’.

He tapped down on the anger and resentment as he pulled his shield off of his arm – if what they were about to do was stupid, then at least he could try to keep a clear head while doing it. “See if you can find any cables or rope in the supplies,” he directed Rhodey, as he took a swing and wedged his shield deeply into the crack between the door and the wall. Fifteen stories was a long drop, and Rhodey could take considerably less damage than he could.

By the time he’d pried the door open, Rhodey had come back with loops of cabling, thin enough to be considered wire, really. Steve raised an eyebrow at it, but didn’t comment; Rhodey wouldn’t have picked something that was unable to hold their weight, or likely to cut them in half rather than stop their fall. The elevator shaft was much worse than he’d expected, though, when he pulled out a flashlight and shone it down into the dark; the lack of floors between here and the bottom meant that there were no beams along the sides, just smooth, concrete walls. At least there were cables, pulled taut between the bottom of the elevator car at the top of the well and the anchor far below. He wondered at their purpose – guidelines?

“This isn’t gonna work,” Rhodey said, poking his head out into the well and looking up and down it with his own flashlight. “We need harnesses.” He sighed. “You probably did crazier things all the time during the War, didn’t you?”

“A few times,” Steve admitted.

“This is going to be hell to get back up, you realize that?”

“Yeah.”

“I should’ve brought the armour.”

“It’d be kinda conspicuous.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll go first.” Rhodey looped wire around his waist several times, before tying it off and passing the other end to Steve, who did likewise. “Don’t fall on top of me.”

That was, of course, very much less likely than the opposite scenario, which was why he was going first. Steve grabbed hold of the elevator door to brace himself, shining the flashlight so Rhodey had enough light to see by, while Rhodey backed as far as the width of the hallway would allow, took a few deep breaths, and made a running leap.

He hit the wires dead on, wrapping arms and legs about them tightly, sliding down only a few feet before he managed to halt the motion. He looked back up at Steve, nodded, then looked down and rolled his eyes, before beginning to squirm-slash-slide downward. When he got about ten feet down, Steve stuck his flashlight between his teeth and leapt for the cables as well, not bothering with the running start; he caught them and halted himself easily. The corded wires dug into his hands and thighs, the metal leeching heat from his hands in particular, but it wasn’t too bad a grip.

It seemed to take forever for Rhodey to crawl down the wire, although Steve knew he was actually proceeding quite quickly; it was just that if it had only been Steve, he would have slid down the wire in half the time. The curved concrete walls of the well, and the endless dark of it – there either being no lights, or JARVIS being unable to turn them on – added to the illusion of their lack of progress, but finally, Rhodey reached the bottom, and Steve let go and fell the rest of the way, landing easily among the crossbeams.

They untied themselves quickly, and Steve stuffed the wire away in his shield-case with the hard-drives. No sense letting it get out of sight.

“Ready?” he asked Rhodey, who drew his gun, stepped to the other side of the beam in front of the closed elevator door, and nodded. Steve pulled his shield off of his arm and swung it into the metal door, creating a sort of handle, since this time the door ended further into the wall. When he tried pulling it open with his shield as a lever, however, it didn’t immediately budge; there was far more weight behind this one than the one above. He shifted his feet to a better position, grunted, and pulled harder – and finally felt it shift an inch or two.

Another minute of strained pulling, and he managed to get the door pushed back far enough that he could see a slight gap between it and the wall. He swung his shield into this, and began levering the door open; metal screeched against metal, echoing horribly in the elevator well, but it moved more easily now. He could see light coming from the other side – although it seemed that the door was at least three feet wide, which seemed fairly overdone – and when he pressed his ear to the crack, he heard someone typing.

They stopped, and he was about to go back to pulling, when JARVIS suddenly announced on the other side of the door, _“Critical reactor breach detected. Initiating total lockdown of GRC. Evacuate upper levels and the park immediately. Critical reactor breach detected. Initiating total lockdown of GRC. Evacuate…”_

Overhead, metal snapped, sending echoes bouncing down leisurely toward them; Steve looked up, but he heard more than he saw the bottom of the elevator heading straight for them in freefall.

“Shit!” Rhodey swore, his flashlight pointing straight up.

Steve jammed his shield in further into the crack between wall and door and shoved. It moved – but too slowly, too slowly – he could fit his lower arm through the resultant crack, but not his body. He pulled his shield back onto his arm, crouched so that his feet were braced almost flat against the side of the crossbeam, grabbed hold of the edge of the door and _hauled_ as hard as he could, pulling it the last few inches he needed. Then he pulled himself upright and through the gap, sideways, Rhodey right behind him.

The hallway beyond was short and squat; a paunchy, middle-aged man he didn’t recognize – Drenkov or Roberts - sat off to one side with a laptop his hands, an ugly, triumphant smile on his face. He was getting to his feet as they evacuated the elevator well, but he hadn’t quite made it in time before Steve sprinted forward and was on him, ripping the laptop from his hands. He cursed in Russian – Drenkov, then – and tried to grab it back, but Steve smacked him a dazing blow with the shield and he fell to the floor, right before the elevator slammed into the ground with enough force to make them all flinch away.

_“…reactor breach detected. Initiating total lockdown of GRC. Evacuate upper levels and the park immediately. Critical reactor breach detected. Initiating total lockdown of GRC. Evacuate…”_

The laptop screen didn’t make any sense; he had no idea what it was showing. Steve passed it to Rhodey, who holstered his gun to take it, and then he grabbed hold of the front of Drenkov’s shirt and lifted him into the air, shaking him – but gently. He needed him cooperative, but he also needed the man’s brains unscrambled. When Drenkov’s eyes focused on him again, no longer dazed, Steve slammed him into the wall, making sure he didn’t do so hard enough to stun him again. “What the hell did you do?” he barked.

Another series of _bangs_ from the elevator well, these increasingly more muffled – the containment system was dropping more seals, trapping them down here like rats.

“You won’t drag me out of here,” Drenkov spat at him. “No more delays, no more re-negotiations or reassignments. This is do or die, now!”

“You triggered a reactor breach – that’ll kill you.”

“No, it won’t,” Drenkov grinned, baring his teeth.

Footsteps pounded – another scientist that Steve didn’t recognise – so, Roberts – rounded the corner, looking frantic. “Igor! What the hell did you do?” Roberts demanded, before noticing Steve and Rhodey. His face wrinkled in further confusion. “Who are you?”

“Is there any way you can stop the breach?” Steve asked Rhodey, although he let his glance take in Roberts as well.

“I don’t know! This doesn’t look anything like a systems control,” Rhodey said, his eyes frantically scanning back and forth as he tried to take in code.

“None of our systems are showing what’s wrong,” Roberts said, apparently willing to take them as allies.

“Go,” Steve told Rhodey, who jogged back the way Roberts had come, laptop still in hand.

Roberts craned his neck to see it, following after Rhodey. “That doesn’t look – that’s not an override for the reactor,” he said, voice beginning to fade as they both disappeared from view. The last word had an echo to it, and Steve’s mental map informed him it would be due to the size of the room they were now entering.

Not his concern.

_“…total lockdown of GRC. Evacuate upper levels and the park immediately. Critical reactor breach detected. Initiating total lockdown of GRC. Evacuate upper levels and the park immediately…”_

“How did you cause the breach?” Steve demanded, slamming Drenkov back against the wall again. The scientist’s toes dangled above the ground; he tried to kick and Steve, but Steve just stepped in closer, trapping his feet. It meant he could get right up in Drenkov’s face, too. “Tell me!”

“It’s not a breach,” Drenkov wheezed out, grinning. “It just thinks it is.” He chuckled, breath harsh. “A hundred men wouldn’t be able to lift the block off that elevator,” he managed to tilt his head to the side, toward the elevator. “The only way out is by _my_ research, and you’ll need me to complete it!” He bared his teeth in a feral smile. “And _I_ will be the one to take it, this time.”

“We’ll see about that,” Steve muttered, easily flipping him around and holding him one handed while he pulled out the duct-tape to restrain him. Another scientist gone mad for his research - Tony had really found some winners, here.

A nuclear reactor in the basement, a man wanting the strength of a hundred men – or a thousand: and Drenkov had been working on creating a super soldier. What were the odds that he’d aimed for the Hulk rather than Captain America? Steve wouldn’t have bet against it.

_“…upper levels and the park immediately. Critical reactor breach detected. Initiating total lockdown of GRC. Evacuate upper levels and the park immediately. Critical reactor breach detected – ”_

JARVIS’s droning voice cut off, and Steve picked up Drenkov by his collar and dragged him into the main room. It was enormous, compared to the labs he’d seen so far, with a ceiling two or three stories high, and unlike the other labs was round. The lab equipment and arrays of computers were the same, though. Three other hallways led out of the main room; one, to another, smaller lab – according to the blueprints, at least – and another to a bathroom.

The third one was the most interesting; it hadn’t been marked on the blueprints at all, but Steve could see an enormous setup, with some sort of device made from concentric circles, pointing down it. Iron grating ran down the middle like a walkway, until it ended in the centre of another large room with shiny metal plates placed strategically around it, as if to do – what? If it had been a concert hall, Steve would have said it was to make sure the sound echoed appropriately, but it wasn’t. They worked with gamma-level energies down here, not sound - what were they doing with this? It didn’t seem to be complete; there were gaps where his sense for pattern said that there should be more plates, and on the floor were a number of the plates stacked on top of each other. A few more were laid out near the end with all sorts of wires running into them haphazardly.

There’d be time to investigate that later. He went through to where the voices were coming from, in the second lab. Roberts and Rhodey were arguing over a long touchscreen panel while another scientist, a mousy-looking man whom Steve recognized as Parks, watched them wide-eyed, like a deer paralyzed by headlights.

“Security hasn’t been compromised – look, I can’t get past it right now!” Roberts said, gesturing at the portion of the screen in front of him.

“This definitely has security cracking in it,” Rhodey said, scrolling down on the laptop. “Backdoor in through – the alarm systems, look like.”

“I’m telling you, it couldn’t be through there – ”

“Drenkov says he didn’t cause a breach, just tricked the systems into thinking he did,” Steve interrupted them, dropping Drenkov to the floor in front of them. He overbalanced and nearly fell over; Steve caught his arm only long enough to ensure that he didn’t hit the ground _too_ hard.

Rhodey and Roberts stared at him. Parks transferred his wide-eyed gaze to Steve as well. It was Drenkov who spoke, though. “I have no desire to destroy the reactors. The lockdown is all I need.” He struggled to roll over onto his back; Steve let him, although he regretted it when it allowed Drenkov to grin up at him. “You’ll have to authorize the test.”

Roberts went pale with relief. “Oh, god,” he stumbled backward until he found a chair, then sat down hard. “Oh, thank god.” Rhodey was more disciplined, but he, too, looked like he was giving thanks – just maybe not aloud.

“What test are you talking about?” Steve asked Drenkov. He looked up at Roberts to include him in the question.

“The activation of the serum by high-intensity gamma radiation,” Drenkov grinned. “Stark refused to allow high enough bursts – but I’ve perfected the formula, now. I have only to mix it up and to take it. I knew someone would come to clean up down here. You’ll have to authorize it – it’s the only way any of us will get out of here.”

Steve grimaced and tore off another few stripes of duct tape, then stuck them firmly over Drenkov’s mouth. The scientist didn’t make it easy for him; he had to grip Drenkov’s jaw and force it closed. Then Steve picked him up and dragged him over to a wall, away from any equipment, where Steve could keep an eye on him without having him be underfoot.

“He might have a point,” Roberts said faintly, watching.

“If he does then we’re dying down here.”

“Captain?” Rhodey eyed him carefully. “A word?”

They went over to the entrance to the tunnel into the room, although Steve knew it wouldn’t be enough to prevent the scientists from hearing them – the rooms weren’t loud. “If that serum is our only way out, we need to consider it.”

“He’s ready to die for his cause,” Steve said, looking back at the man. It had been a while since he’d seen that level of fanaticism – nearly seventy years. “He’s not going to give up that formula to anyone else, and we are not unleashing another Hulk on the world – not one controlled by someone like that.”

Rhodey’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s what he was aiming at? Well, damn, I thought he just wanted to become another you,” he muttered, resigned. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Alright,” he raised his voice, nodding once at Steve and heading back over to the scientists – this time addressing Roberts and Parks, and ignoring Drenkov entirely. “We need an alternate way out of here. Either of you know any details about this place, weak spots in the seal?”

“It’s… there’s some lead-lining, I think,” Roberts said weakly. “But the bulk of it was just to seal all exits with ultra-fast-drying concrete...”

 _All_ exits? “JARVIS, how much air do we have down here?” Steve asked aloud. “In the GRC.”

_“There are two thousand, four hundred thirty-nine point seven cubic metres of air in the GRC.”_

Roberts mouthed something that looked like, _‘Oh, fuck,’_ lifting his hands to worry at the bald spot on the top of his head.

“How long can we survive on that?” Steve asked Rhodey, who looked like he was trying to do the mental arithmetic.

_“Assuming all persons remain at a level of resting activity continuously, the concentration of carbon dioxide will reach lethal levels in approximately twelve days. Assuming all persons participate in strenuous activity continuously, the concentration of carbon dioxide will reach lethal levels in approximately three days.”_

“Thanks, JARVIS,” Steve said, habit enforcing the pleasantry even if it was only a copy of JARVIS – and an annoying one, at that. “Uh – command done. Three to twelve days, that’s not bad, right?” he asked Rhodey.

“Plus fumes from machinery,” Rhodey said grimly. “That might be the bigger problem, if we’ve got to drill our way through fifteen solid floors of concrete.”

“It can’t be like that in every direction,” Steve said.

“Actually, it probably is,” Roberts said, twitching as they both turned to look at him. “Um – we are under sea level…”

“I can probably put together some CO2 scrubbers,” Rhodey sighed. “And, uh, filtration systems.” He made a face, and from that Steve gathered that the process wouldn’t be pleasant. He honestly couldn’t care, though – that it was even possible to extend their deadline was a relief.

“We might have more luck with a laser cutter,” Roberts said speculatively, turning to Parks. “Arthur? What’s your take?”

Parks, if it was possible, went even more immobile, his eyes bulging. After a moment of this, Roberts turned to look in the direction of his stare – which was fixed on Steve and Rhodey – and gained an expression of sick understanding, layered over top of fear and anger. “Oh. Uh,” Roberts said, “Who _are_ you people? Do you have authorization from Stark?”

“Steve Rogers,” Steve pointed at himself, “Colonel James Rhodes. We’re friends of Tony’s.”

“JARVIS?” Roberts asked. “Have, uh, is Arthur allowed to talk to them?”

 _“Negative,”_ JARVIS droned.

Steve felt his face harden; he glanced over at Rhodey and saw his expression mirrored there. “He might have a stroke if he starts answering questions, huh?” Rhodey asked, his tone very carefully neutral.

“I can’t say. I’m not sure if it might,” Roberts waved a hand at Parks, helplessly. For his part, Parks had finally stopped staring at them – now he’d closed his eyes and seemed to be doing his best to ignore their existence entirely.

_“Query not understood. Please restate.”_

Steve sort of wanted to close his eyes and pretend that Parks didn’t exist in return, but couldn’t. “JARVIS? Can I authorize Dr. Parks to build a laser for the purpose of cutting a hole in the roof and getting us out of here?”

 _“Authorization accepted,”_ JARVIS droned.

The combination of those two results didn’t make any sense. They could give permission to Parks to build their escape route, but not talk to him? What the hell had Tony been thinking?

How the hell had Tony justified it?

If only it wasn’t a skeleton version of JARVIS - this was like talking to the hologram that Tony had left behind: it had information that they desperately needed, but there wasn’t a substantial _mind_ behind it. There wasn’t anything that could explain what Tony had done. Every time JARVIS spoke Steve missed the inflections and nuances in his voice, the proof of personality. He could only pray that whatever had happened to cut them off from the outside world so effectively hadn’t done so by killing JARVIS. Did he have another hard backup?

“Command done, JARVIS,” Steve said, tiredly.

“Alright. He can get started on that – or on figuring out another way out of here,” Rhodey said. “I’m gonna get started on those CO2 filters and downloading the database. How about you tell us about what you were working on down here while I do that?” He looked pointedly at Roberts.

“Oh, well, um,” Roberts fumbled. Parks took advantage of the opportunity to practically run out of the room; Steve tracked him by sound, and it seemed like he’d stopped in the main room, by the circular apparatus. Was that a laser? What was Tony doing down here that needed a laser specialist, anyway? Parks had been one of Loki’s hires, which meant it had _something_ to do with the Tesseract – but what?

“We do – a lot of stuff? I mean, Stark has his projects, that he wants us working on, but he lets us – well, he let Igor and me – look, this is a facility that a lot of nuclear physicists would kill to get access to, y’know that?” Given the company he was keeping, Steve wondered if he _had_ killed to get access to it. “I do research into alternative heavy metal fission sources, so I’ve been taking that places I thought I’d never get to go, not back when I had crappy funding at Culver - Stark, he was a lot into radiation shielding, he had got Chen and me working on that. That’s a lot of what we use Tessa for – er, she, it’s, that’s the nuclear reactor. Well, it’s not really a single… reactor in the sense that most people think. We use that as our source for gamma rays, and also others…” he paused, sighed. “Look, it’s kind of hard to explain to somebody who isn’t a nuclear physicist. Basically, I investigate the properties of nuclear materials – I’ve been looking at cobalt-60 a lot, had some pretty good luck there – but what Stark wanted was broad-energy EM shielding, reflection, and redirection. Except portable, so no just sticking slabs of high-density material in front of things – we’ve been working on some really abstract stuff, I… don’t really know how to explain it to a layman.” He looked apologetic.

“What’s his serum?” Steve nodded at the gagged Drenkov.

“I don’t know anything about that,” Roberts said defensively – perhaps too defensively. He seemed mostly honest, but perhaps he’d overheard something before today’s fuckup. “He wasn’t in on my projects, I thought he was doing work on gamma absorption and storage.”

“And what about Dr. Parks?”

“You probably saw it as you came in – the laser and focus setup? That’s all him. Honestly, I’m not too familiar with his stuff, other than contributing some of the radiation guidance.”

While Roberts had been talking, Rhodey had started rooting around in lab equipment, pulling the panels off of a couple of machine that Steve didn’t recognize and revealing innards that Steve also didn’t recognize. Now, his voice muffled by having his head half-in one large machine, Rhodey said, “Take your best guess.”

Roberts scratched at his scalp. “Uh. Well, okay, I mean, a year ago this would have sounded crazy, I would have said maybe that Stark wanted to do something with creating matter from energy, or maybe bending space-time in a local area - but, uh. After the whole thing with aliens? Maybe tearing space-time is more to the point than just bending it. But I don’t know for sure!” he added hastily, when he saw the expression on Steve’s face.

Steve schooled himself to calm. Tony had been building himself a portal. An interstellar portal - like the one that Loki had opened, or the one that Dr. Foster was working on opening to Asgard? The latter didn’t seem likely. If it was just to Asgard, why hide it?

“JARVIS, download that to a removable drive,” Rhodey ordered.

 _“Warning: removal of any drive will trigger the Stockholm Protocol,”_ JARVIS droned.

They all three of them froze; Steve could hear that Parks had frozen, too, in the next room over. Drenkov grunted as loudly as he could past the duct tape.

“What’s the Stockholm Protocol?” Steve asked cautiously.

 _“You do not have authorization to access that information.”_ Of course. Stockholm – did that mean it had something to do with whatever trigger was connected to Parks? Having a name for it made the concept, if possible, even more unpalatable.

Steve sighed. “Would you be of any help to Dr. Parks?” he asked Roberts.

_“Query not understood. Please restate.”_

“I might be.” Roberts shrugged uncomfortably.

“Go find out, then,” Steve told him, and followed him into the next room over, trusting Rhodey to keep an eye on Drenkov. He picked a patch of wall from where he had both scientists in full view and sat down against it, trying to relax his body despite the strain. He had nothing to contribute to the science or tech end, and standing around would just wear out his body – and their oxygen supply. Granted, Rhodey might be able to come up with some scrubbers, whatever those did, but food and water were going to be an issue. Immobility was the best defence.

Hours passed. Rhodey finished his filters – although it didn’t look a damn thing like any filter Steve had ever seen – and set them up to whirr away steadily. None too soon, either, from Steve’s point of view; the air was already beginning to smell uncomfortably humid and stale. Then Rhodey dragged Drenkov into the main room and joined Parks and Roberts in investigating a way to cut a hole into the ceiling, Parks being very careful to address everything he said to Roberts. Half the problem, as far as Steve could understand it, was that if they just shot it straight up, they’d have to worry about slag landing on the apparatus – but if they tilted it at enough of an angle to protect it, then they’d end up tunnelling through significantly more concrete – maybe even more than expected, if they missed the fourth sublevel. Either way, there was nothing for Steve to do except sit and keep an eye on Drenkov. As much as he itched for some form of exercise, to do _something_ , there was no point in using up oxygen any faster than they had to – filters or no.

 _“Door 1S has been opened without permission,”_ JARVIS reported, interrupting their discussion.

Door 1S – that was the door between the first sublevel hallway and the stairwell. But how had anyone gotten into that hallway in the first place? “Who opened it, JARVIS?” Steve asked, rising to his feet, feeling the adrenaline begin to rise again – even though there _still_ wasn’t anything he could do from down here but hope it was SHIELD. He hadn’t even realized that the doors were still closed – he’d thought it more likely that they’d all been opened automatically when Drenkov triggered the lockdown of the GRC and the evacuation of everywhere else.

 _“Persons unknown,”_ JARVIS droned unhelpfully. _“Door 1A has been opened without permission.”_ Hansen’s. Well, at least he didn’t have to worry about the scientists being stuck anywhere without food for long, although he’d been pretty confident that those three would be retrieved sooner than they would from down here. _“Door 1B has been opened without permission. Door 1C has been opened without permission. Door 1D has been opened without permission. Door 2S has been opened without permission.”_

“Strike force,” Rhodey observed. “Unless somebody managed to hack the system again.”

“Describe the intruders,” Steve suggested to JARVIS.

 _“Twenty eight intruders,”_ JARVIS said, and that actually was helpful, for once. _“Ages twenty-four to forty-five. Male. Han Chinese. Heights 158cm to 192cm. Clothing: black. Door 3S has been opened without permission…”_

Lu’s people, then – unless SHIELD was deciding to send locals. But that wasn’t like SHIELD, not on any of the ops that Steve had observed, not when cover was already blown. So, Lu’s people. Damn.

“Can you relay audio or visual?”

_“Query not understood. Please restate. Door 2F has been opened without permission…”_

“Can you tell us what they’re saying?”

JARVIS was silent for a minute, long enough that Steve was about to repeat himself, but finally said, _“Unable to process audio input from sublevel one. Complex input detected.”_

Rhodey tried, “JARVIS, would you be able to tell them a message?”

_“Affirmative.”_

“Tell these exact words: The reactor breach was a false alarm. There is no reactor breach. There are five people in the basement who will starve to death unless dug out. Please send aid. Oh, and repeat it in Mandarin and Cantonese.”

 _“Repeating message. The reactor breach was a false alarm,”_ JARVIS repeated tonelessly – hopefully, he was also saying it above. _“There are five people in the basement who will starve to death unless dug out. Please send aid. Oh. And repeat it in Mandarin and Cantonese.”_

Rhodey rolled his eyes. “Command done, JARVIS.”

“So… what does that mean?” Roberts asked, looking between them both.

“Not much to us down here,” Rhodey shook his head. “Even if they have a plan to get us out, we might as well meet them halfway. Let’s get back to work.”

_“Door 2E has been opened without permission…”_

_“Door 2A has been opened without permission…”_

_“Dr. Maya Hansen has left room 1A-1.”_

Accompanied by Lu’s people. Steve gritted his teeth and hoped that Natasha had an in – she must have, right? “Just... tell me when anybody enters or leaves a level.”

Apparently, whoever was directing the strike force wasn’t interested in getting them out, because none of them bothered to venture past the third sublevel. Rhodey ordered his message repeated several more times, with variations increasingly close to begging, but no other doors were opened – or maybe it was a hacker, and they’d just managed to shut JARVIS out.

More time passed. Parks, with help from everyone – even Steve, when it came to heavy lifting – disassembled the laser from the flatform and started reassembling it tilted on its side, with modifications. They all took breaks for water; Rhodey drained the remaining clean water from the pipes, into a few empty half-barrels lying around, and started work on filtration systems – which, Steve could see, really were worth the grimace. Steve occasionally let Drenkov up to move about, and, on two occasions, had to put him out with a chokehold before he was able to restrain him again. At least the duct tape was sort of reusable.

They all got hungry and irritable, the scientists in particular. The meagre supply of power bars and the much larger supply of instant coffee from the kitchenette might have to stretch a long way. Steve felt the hunger just as strongly – probably more strongly; that was the downside of having a revved up metabolism, even if he was fortunate in that he actually needed less water than the others. But he couldn’t complain, not when he was doing nothing but keeping an eye on Drenkov and occasionally moving something heavy.

His mind wouldn’t stop going in circles, from Skynet to Stockholm to extremis to the Tesseract.

When he couldn’t stand sitting still any longer, he snagged a computer and got JARVIS to print off whatever files he was ‘authorized’ to see – reducing the font size to be as small as possible. With all the paper they had, it would still only be a fraction of their total supply. What files he was allowed to look at seemed to be determined at random, with no pattern that he could see – although, granted, he didn’t understand most of them enough to know what he was looking at. Some were in Russian, too, which didn’t help; on one of the computers all the files were in Chinese, but he couldn’t manage to open any of those.

“Alright,” Roberts said finally, in response to Parks’ nod. “Time to turn this on.” He tilted his head tiredly toward the hallway to the other room.

“Come on, Steve, bad idea to be in the same room as this thing when it’s going,” Rhodey said, looking exhausted as well. None of them had taken any long breaks. How long had it been, anyway? Steve checked the time on the computer he’d been looking at and winced. Fourteen hours since they’d gotten caught down here – where was SHIELD?

Steve picked up Drenkov by his coat, again, and they all trooped into the other room; Rhodey took the CO2 scrubber with them. “How long is this going to take?” Steve asked him.

“Couple of days, maybe, to get through the entire thing. We’re gonna drill two holes, straight through, and then we can stick some gum to it, widen it out more easily – if we stick any directly to the roof it won’t work so well, it can’t blow out upward, but with the paired tunnels at the right distance, I think we can get a couple of key fractures.” Rhodey grinned, looking pleased at the idea, and punch-drunk from lack of sleep.

The activation of the laser went without fanfare. They closed the door into the hallway, to keep out dust and ensure nobody got blinded by the flash – Steve was the only one for whom the blindness would heal – but on the occasion that Steve poked his head through to look at the progress, it seemed to be proceeding exactly as expected.  Then he spent the next twenty minutes blinking spots out of his vision, and during that time the scientists discovered that there was a layer of metal sitting over the ceiling, changing all the estimations they’d made, and requiring that Parks shut down, recalibrate, and then restart the laser to get the proper performance from it.

By the time he was done, Roberts had sacked out on a table to sleep, using packing paper as blankets. Steve wished he could do the same, but instead he nodded to Rhodey to get some sleep, and resumed his seat by the wall, taking watch as JARVIS dimmed the lights. The air wasn’t _cold_ , precisely, but the concrete seemed to leech warmth straight out of the bones whenever Steve thought about letting his mind drift off. Going to sleep in the company of a criminal and a madman seemed like an impossible idea.

Rhodey woke after only a few hours, and after turning the control screen for the laser to face Steve, came over to sit down beside him, a foot or so away. He groused quietly as he tried to find a comfortable way to sit – admittedly, there wasn’t one. They sat in silence for a while, listening to Parks’ snores and Drenkov’s slightly whistling breaths. Steve wondered if it bothered Rhodey. Bunking down with others was something that Steve had been doing regularly for his entire life, both before and after the war; enough that often he wandered down to Tony’s workshop late at night even when he wasn’t having difficulty sleeping, just for the company. But Rhodey had been an officer – a _USAF_ officer – for a long time now, and no doubt he was used to more privacy.

The silence dragged out, but before Steve could ask, Rhodey said, his voice low, “I should have said this, uh, back on the plane before we landed. I just… wasn’t sure I could, then.” He breathed, in, out. “I don’t blame you.”

Steve sat frozen, staring ahead into the dimness of the lab. He’d been waiting – but Rhodey – he had – “It was my watch,” he said finally, his voice strained almost to cracking.

Rhodey took a long time to reply. “That’s – why I couldn’t say it. Earlier.”

Steve couldn’t move.

In his peripheral vision, he saw Rhodey shake his head. “I’ve – lost soldiers, before. I’ve had friends – ” he broke off. “Cruelest thing you can do, most unfair thing in the world, is to put that blame on the guys who come back alive, when it isn’t their fault. It’s war. And I knew it wasn’t – Tony’s _Tony_ , he’s always been – ” Rhodey paused, struggled for words. “I knew you deserved to hear it. To know I didn’t blame you. But I couldn’t – I didn’t think I could say it and mean it. But now – I can. So.” He shrugged, a stiff, jerky motion. “I don’t blame you.”

The silence was broken only by the sound of breathing; Steve had never been more intensely aware of someone else’s breath. Parks snorted in his sleep, suddenly, interrupting the rhythm of his snoring, and Steve flinched at the noise; it echoed off of the curved walls and somehow made the silence behind it – the silence enforced by being almost completely cut off from the world above – even larger.

“It was my watch,” he whispered again, finally.

“Tony does shit,” Rhodey said, and there was an undercurrent of vicious anger to it, for all that he didn’t raise his voice. “He hides shit. I couldn’t figure it out when he was dying, when – I couldn’t figure it out then, and I thought, I was the worst, most miserable – never mind. You didn’t figure it out, either – that’s on him. He’s been pulling shit, with all of this,” he didn’t move, didn’t gesture, but nonetheless managed to convey the sense of the entire problem they were run up against, “and it’s on him.”

But how could it be? Tony had been an adult, capable of making his own decisions – but if he had decided to end his life, then he _wasn’t_ a rational adult. Tony had lied and hid the completely insane things he was doing – and somewhere along the line, he’d lost his mind and snapped completely. Whether it had been six months or sixteen minutes before he’d taken his own life, the fact was that Steve had missed it.

He sat there in the dim light, listening to the others breathe, and at some point, he fell asleep.

 

 

_He rushed the two men in black that entered behind the nurse, picking each up one handed and slamming them bodily into the wall, hard enough to break the plaster and throw them onto the floor outside. Taking the opening, he ran through – and then he just ran. Soldiers, guards, shouted for him to stop, their English accented – accented like Erskine’s had been. White-coated scientists backed against the walls in alarm, clutching clipboards to their chests, and then Steve was outside._

_It was, he knew instantly, New York. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did. The bricks in the street, perhaps, or the square layout, of a sort that no old-world European city had ever sported._

_And it was a burned out husk. Half the buildings outside lay in ruins; construction workers laboured to tear down the remains, or effect repairs, under the watchful eye of black-coated guards carrying blue-glowing guns. The workers were dressed in threadbare clothing, many of them without shoes, but they all sported, just as the guards did, a carefully kept black band upon their arms, emblazoned with the white symbol of Hydra._

_One of the workers tripped, fell. He was dark-haired, skinny to the point of malnourishment; he tumbled to the ground and rolled into a patch of mud. The white symbol was instantly obscured. The guards did not hesitate; two raised their weapons and fired immediately, and the boy was ripped apart into blue-bloody shreds._

_Steve couldn’t move. He couldn’t flinch, couldn’t draw breath. He had failed. Everything he had fought for – everything every Allied soldier had fought for, that they’d hoped for, prayed for in the face of an uncertain future – they had all lost._

_They were lost._

 

 

 

 

Steve woke suddenly when he felt, more than heard, someone move nearby him. Before he'd come fully awake he was on his feet, shield in hand and raised defensively, lunging forward toward whomever it was – Rhodey, his brain finally clicked in. Rhodey, who was standing with his back to the wall and his hands raised in surrender.

Slowly, Steve lowered the shield, trying to get his dream-shattered nerves under control.

“Woah,” Roberts said, frozen even though he hadn’t been the focus of Steve’s almost-attack; he was sitting over in the middle of the room, a game of solitaire up on his computer screen. “Uh?”

“What is it?”

“Natasha’s up above,” Rhodey said. “And the first hole’s drilled, so she can drop us down supplies.”

 _“Natasha’s up above. And the first hole’s drilled so she can drop us down supplies,”_  JARVIS repeated him flatly, and then added, _“Is he awake.”_ The lack of intonation made Steve need to take an extra second to realize that it was supposed to be a question – and, evidently, relayed from Natasha. How had Rhodey managed to get that to work, when JARVIS hadn’t been able to figure out it before? Steve shoved the resentful thought away – it wasn’t important, so long as it _did_ work.

“Thank God,” Steve said. “Uh – JARVIS, repeat what I say to her.”

 _“Rhodes. Steve,”_ JARVIS droned, and, _“Command accepted.”_

“Yeah, I’m here. Glad to hear you – she passed a check-in?” he asked Rhodey.

 _“Yes. I did,”_ came the answer, as Rhodey also nodded.

Steve smiled, feeling some of the tension ease. He might be stuck in a hole with three mad scientists, but Natasha was right outside and knew where they were. “We are both really glad it’s you,” he said emphatically, although all of the feeling was lost when JARVIS repeated it. 

“ _Glad to hear that it's you over there too and sounding like yourself.”_ They probably didn’t – _she_ didn’t sound anything like herself, not filtered through JARVIS – but he tried to fill in the intonation in his head. “ _I was worried you’d gotten infected._

“What?”

_“You don't. When did you get stuck down there.”_

A moment passed before Steve realized that was supposed to be a question. He checked his watch. “Thirty-seven hours.”

_“Before or after the zombie apocalypse.”_

“ _What?_ ” Steve asked, more strained this time.

_“So you missed it. Damn. I’d hoped you’d be able to provide details. What happened to you.”_

“If you’ve got enough time, we’ll fill you in,” Rhodey said, and when he got a bland, _“Yes,”_ back, he gave her a summary of the events after they’d parted ways. A few times he paused, glancing over at the scientists, but when he looked back at Steve, Steve shrugged – there wasn’t really much point in editing. This bunch was going straight into SHIELD custody – possibly for the rest of their lives. _Definitely_ , in Drenkov’s case.

 _“I see,”_ Natasha said finally, when he wound up with the latest estimation of how long it would take them to get out – another few days, at least, but they’d have a hole all the way up within a few hours – and now they had somebody to drop food and water supplies down to them. _“After you tripped the alarm Lu had the Park locked down. He even managed to cut out JARVIS. He tried to interrogate me.”_ Steve tried to picture her smile at this, but it was hard, though the monotone. _“His people managed to breach the facility after a few hours and that’s when things become unclear. There was a fight. The scientists didn’t like having their projects suddenly shut down. One of them at least must have had a plan and serious weaponry. I overheard one report saying that people were getting hit with electricity. Lasers. There’s scorch marks all over the first level’s walls. But that’s not the problem now. Some kind of biological agent was released.”_

Shit. _Extremis_.

“When you say biological agent…” Rhodey said slowly. “You were kidding about the zombies, right?”

_“I wish. It was in aerosol form at first. It was released down here and didn’t seem to do anything for a bit. But after half an hour those exposed to it started going strange. They try to wound anyone who isn’t infected. I think they’re trying to spread it by contact with bodily fluids. Infection is quick. At least it’s not airborne anymore.”_

“I don’t understand,” Steve said. “You said zombies – like, voodoo?” Was one of the scientists supposed to be some sort of magician? But what was the point of getting a bunch of people to impersonate the dead? Or was the brainwashing meant to create soldiers?

“No, it’s…” Rhodey looked momentarily flummoxed. “Uh, zombies are walking corpses. Dead, mindless – try to eat the brains of the living. It’s a popular thing in movies – it’s not really got anything to do with voodoo, these days.”

 Oh. _“In our case they’re still alive although it does seem to be killing them slowly and starting with higher brain function. They began shambling after a day or two. Falling apart. Most of them. But at the same time it also provides some defense. Healing. They can take a lot of damage and keep going. Getting in here was. Difficult.”_

“It has to be extremis.”

“Borjigin said all the lab mice died,” Steve pointed out, although he wasn’t disagreeing.

“Yeah, but he didn’t say how long it took them to die.” Rhodey shook his head. “You should get out of here, agent. Come back with reinforcements.”

 _“And who would be leading them,”_ she retorted. _“It’s not that simple. I disabled Lu’s signal dampener. That’s one thing that SHIELD will want. But JARVIS still isn’t responding and I haven’t been able to get through to SHIELD.”_

“Natasha, we’re gonna be stuck here for days,” Steve said. “Toss us some food and get out. We’ll be fine.”

 _“It’s not that simple,”_ she repeated, and Steve’s stomach sank further. _“Most of the Park is infected by now. But not all of them are zombies. There are some. They’re different. I’ve had to hide from two so far. One of them breathed fire a thirty-foot long stream of flame from his mouth and he could run five times as fast as you can. Engagement was unwise.”_

Steve grimaced. Borjigin had been talking about matching to DNA – it looked like, given enough samples, extremis had found a few people it worked for, and how. Steve could outrun Olympic sprinters; he could outrun _cars_ , provided they weren’t doing free-way speeds. But that couldn’t be the reason Natasha was still here. If that was just that, she’d have gotten out – she could sneak around any individual. No, she might have stayed to look for them – but that she was refusing to try to leave met there was something else, too.

Sure enough, she continued, _“The Chinese military has the city surrounded and has been broadcasting quarantine messages on loudspeaker. They’re shooting anyone who gets too close to the walls. One of the super-powered zombies just jumped over them and took off though so the containment may not last. That SHIELD hasn’t sent in an extraction team means that the Chinese government is likely being obstructive.”_

“You can’t get through?” Rhodey asked, his eyebrows shooting up toward his hairline.

_“They knocked down all the buildings around the perimeter and bulldozed the rubble. There is no cover and it’s lit up with floodlights. No I can’t get through.”_

“We need a plan to get out of here,” Steve said, somehow hearing the frustration even through JARVIS’ flat tones. “But it’ll have to be by SHIELD. First, we need to get to the surface – then we can figure out some way to get in contact. Maybe try an old-fashioned way – they’ve gotta be watching.”

_“Agreed. How many civilian scientists in there with you.”_

“Two, and a third who’s a prisoner,” said Rhodey, shooting Drenkov a dark look. “He’s the one who triggered the security protocols that locked us in here.”

_“Getting out is going to be difficult enough with cooperative baggage. We can’t afford to bring a hostile with us.”_

“They’re all valuable,” Steve said firmly. “And they’re all people. I’m not going to leave someone behind.”

“I’m with the Captain on this one.”  

 _“Military,”_ she said after a moment, and with JARVIS in-between them Steve had no idea if it was meant to be a benediction or a curse.

They spent the next few hours briefing each other and making plans. Some of the information they didn’t pass along – didn’t want to pass along, not when they couldn’t be sure he was out of earshot of the scientists. Listening to Natasha’s reports filtered through JARVIS was enough to give him a phantom headache after a while – not a read headache, but a general feeling of dullness that he couldn’t shake off.

It was even worse trying to argue with her.

_“You haven’t been out here Steve. You haven’t seen these people. They’re already dead.”_

“If they’re still walking then they’re not dead yet,” Steve snapped back, knowing that JARVIS would convey none of the emphasis, and hating it. “We are _not_ shooting civilians!”

_“They’re not civilians. They’re hostile. You didn’t see the first wave. They attack. Create open wounds. Infect and move on.”_

“They are innocent people!”

“If they’re attacking...” Rhodey said, reluctantly.

“If it’s extremis then it’s partly a computer program,” Steve gritted out. “We could get a tech in, somebody who can try to reprogram it, fix it – ”

_“We have to get out alive to be able to do that. The infection is quick. Less than half an hour. I tried incapacitating. Steve. You think I don’t know how to incapacitate someone. That’s what my line of work is. Once they’re infected. They don’t feel pain. They don’t stop. They don’t slow down. It kills them. But it keeps them alive too. Healing factor. Significant cranial trauma is the only thing that stops them. I don’t know if even that would stop the ones extremis worked on.”_

“We have to find another way.” Hundreds of thousands of people worked in the Park – there were more civilians trapped in here than there had been in Hiroshima.

For months after the Chitauri invasion, Bruce’s lab had held a fallout spread from the detonation of the nuke that the WSC would have dropped on Manhattan, a map tacked up on the wall (an actual paper map – but Bruce, unlike Tony, actually had plenty of paper in his lab, something that they argued about frequently). It was a bird’s-eye view of the city with tiny red rings of death around it, timeframes and percentage fatalities hand-written neatly along the edge of each one, with a map of the world beside it, showing the projected drift of the fallout.

He’d wondered why Bruce had it, and not Tony – other than the obvious paper issue, Tony had been the one to pitch a fit at Fury, for all that Bruce had been equally angry over the Phase II plan. Then he’d seen Tony standing alone Bruce’s lab one day, a tumbler of alcohol in one hand, tracing over one of the red circles with his other, a dark look on his face.

Steve had stepped up beside him, looking at the chillingly large numbers. “I never thanked you for that,” he’d said quietly. Maybe he should have. Maybe the words didn’t _need_ to be said, but should have been anyway – or maybe, he’d thought, watching Tony’s expression darken further, it had been the wrong thing to say entirely.

“You shouldn’t,” Tony had said abruptly, turning away from the map and Steve both. “Captain America, thanking somebody for nuking the enemy – doesn’t exactly fit with your whole fair play schtick.”

 _Oh,_ Steve had thought, looking at him. _That_ was why Bruce had put up the map. He’d wondered, once again, what Tony had seen on the other side of that portal – the enemy, certainly, but so many of them that Tony had been staring at the map in _guilt,_ rather than in relief?

“You didn’t have a choice.”

“Sure I did,” Tony had mumbled into his tumbler. “Them or us. High atmo detonation or obliteration of – ” he’d cut himself off, his back tense. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter. No choice, not informed on all the variables, decisions down on the wire – ” he’d turned back, and grinned mirthlessly at Steve. “Fury was right, in the end, we do need a nuclear deterrent. Just not in the hands of those asshats.” He’d flicked his fingers at the map.

There was a long silence as Steve waited for Natasha to reply. Part of him wanted her to respond, wanted Rhodey to say something in her support, wanted something to snap back at – but the larger part was hoping he’d finally gotten through to her. They _could not_ write these people off as casualties of war. They’d done too much of that already.

_“Steve. I tried.”_

Steve punched the wall. The concrete dented and scraped his knuckles bloody. Across the room, Parks looked up at him warily, and Drenkov made a muffled laughing noise behind his gag of duct tape.

He stewed in silence for hours after that, barely managing to distract himself by continuing to print off files. Natasha came and went, foraging – _“There may be climbing supplies in the rec centre,”_ she’d put in, while they’d been talking about how to get the scientists out. But their conversations were all in terse, clipped sentences. When Roberts reported that they’d managed, at last, to drill the first hole all the way to the surface, Steve was curt enough to him that he nearly hid behind Rhodey.

 _“Unauthorized persons present on sublevel 1,”_ JARVIS droned, about two hours after that.

“Consider Natasha authorized, JARVIS,” Steve snapped, not for the first time.

_“Unauthorized persons present on sublevel 4.”_

“Who is it, JARVIS?” Rhodey asked, before shaking his head in acknowledgement of the futility of asking that. “Relay their conversation.”

_“Persons: unknown. ...speak English. Yes I can. How are you not one of us. You’re special.”_

Thunder cracked, like off in the distance, with mere echoes reaching them below - gunfire, echoing through the tiny hole in the block. Steve jumped to his feet, as JARVIS continued dully, _“That’s funny. You think that will hurt us. We are immortal. We are invulnerable. We heal. We live. We grow.”_

“Shut the laser off!” Steve called to Parks, and then immediately cursed himself; the extremis supersoldier would no doubt have enhanced hearing just like his own. He jogged over to where Parks was sitting and sat at one of the computers nearby, opening up a word processor and typing as fast as he could.

Rhodey, looking over his shoulder, mouthed, _You fast enough?_

 _Have to be,_ Steve typed on the next line.

JARVIS droned on, _“Then I’m not an obstacle to you. You aren’t of us. You will be. I just want to be left alone. We will become everything. We will overcome everything. Not like you. So easily injured.”_

Rhodey drew his gun and pulled the door fully open. Metal screeched against metal. Steve pulled the monitor forward and twisted it so that Parks could see the message, and then he vaulted over the over bank of computers and darted into the hallway after Rhodey. The laser was sitting silent, but as Steve saw it he immediately realized a problem – the roof was too high for what he had in mind. He met Rhodey’s eyes and saw the same realization there – and then Rhodey started shoving at a table, bringing it into line with another, the same distance apart from the centres as another was long. Of course – the tables were reinforced to support heavy equipment. Steve ducked under another and lifted it on his shoulders, grunting slightly, and raised it up to set it on top of the other two, stacked perpendicular to them. Not high enough – so add a third level, he mentally answered himself.

_“I’m no obstacle to that. You don’t need to worry about me. Tell me how you evaded our grasp. I’m very good at what I do. I’m better. I’m better than everyone else. I will always be better. I’m immortal now. You will be too.”_

Someone who could breathe fire and run five times as fast as Steve could wasn’t a civilian, not if they were threatening his teammate. A low, dark heat curled in Steve’s belly, anger finally given a viable target: an enemy he could face, a bully he could take down, someone he could stand up to. Something he could do to stop all of the mindless violence. He tilted over a table, sending equipment crashing to the ground, and hoisted it up, jumping up onto another table so he could place it.

 _“Malfunction detected,”_ JARVIS reported. _“You don’t want to do that. Oh. Let me explain. I have a friend. He’s sort of like you. He was made better. But it was done differently. Do you know anything about what made you better. Yes. Everything. You’re stalling.”_

Steve walked underneath the hole and squinted up. It was a long way to the top – but there were still lights on up there, and a tiny spot made its way down through the concrete. Enough for somebody enhanced to easily hear him – and Steve had plenty of practice at baiting bullies. He made himself grin, made himself put the grin into words, and said up to it, “Coward. You’re afraid.”

Some instinct had him throw himself to the side - and just in time. A blast of white-hot flame burst down the column, and metal melted and ran; the gap went red and closed, the molten metal sealing it lower down. Drops of molten lead landed on the floor, hissing. Steve closed his eyes, forced himself not to swallow - it would be audible - and laughed, instead, certain that the extremis-enhanced intruder would hear him. The certainty of a gambler who has just staked everything. “Is that the best you can do? You don’t heal from everything.”

 _“LIES,”_ someone snarled with the voice of ten people, their vocal chords warped and overlaid. It reverberated through metal and rock, and Steve prayed that Natasha would be okay, would still have her hearing after that.

JARVIS echoed dully, _“Lies.”_

“Nah. I do.” JARVIS repeated his words like a marionette. “I’m down here, with the nuclear reactor, and you’re _scared_ of it. You can’t withstand that - it’ll melt the flesh off of your bones, and you’ll die. You’re not immortal,” he walked blithely back down the hallway, toward the laser apparatus stacked on top of the third table, and casually jumped up it. Confidence, or lack thereof, would be heard in his gait.

The ceiling trembled beneath a blow. Then another – stronger, closer. At the edge of his hearing was the sound of rock tearing, and he prayed, prayed he hadn’t miscalculated, that what made extremis so powerful was _healing_ – it had to be, anything that was still flesh couldn’t take that kind of punishment – another blow, and dust shook from the ceiling, then pebbles.

Steve hoisted the laser up above his head, groaning with effort – it was heavier than the table, heavier than any motorcycle that he had ever lifted, with or without a few dames sitting on it. But over his head it meant that when Rhodey signalled Parks, the reactivated beam was nearly at roof level. Too close to be avoided. If the zombie wasn’t shielded by falling rock – a chunk of rubble the size of Steve’s head smashed into the floor beneath the hole, soon followed by another, larger piece. Steve forced himself not to think about it, to hold the laser steady, although the flash from where the beam met concrete was throwing spots over his vision.

Too many pieces of rubble were falling, too far away from the point of entry. The enhanced zombie would bring the ceiling down on them all.

Steve closed his eyes and recalled the expression of every sneering bully he’d ever faced, and made it his own. “Coward,” he murmured, and he knew from the feeling of filth on his skin that he’d gotten it just _right_.

A scream; a roar that echoed, echoed past the rock – two more blows and centre of the ceiling shattered, with a sound so much sharper, louder, than the earlier gunfire. A dark figure fell through among the rubble, through the beam, and Steve prayed, _Please let it be healing, not toughness, please -_

The body hit the floor and fell apart into pieces, the lower legs and arms cut off just as much as the head had been. But even as Steve peered down, looking to the side to be able to see past the mass of dark spots that was his central vision, the bit of the torso still attached to the head was beginning to heal, fast enough that a severed hand was pushed away from the growing body. The other pieces weren’t regenerating – it was the brain, it had to be the brain.

Steve grunted and went to one knee; the laser apparatus tilted forward, dangerously close to dropping, falling to the floor, out of control. He tightened his grip and heaved back, aiming the beam for the still-living body. When the laser exposure had only been for a fraction of a second, it had cut the body neatly; now, positioned steadily, flesh crisped and then vaporized before it.

The torso ceased growing. Steve ran the laser across the area for another minute anyway, until it was entirely gone, and then carefully backed up and gave the rest of the pieces the same treatment, just in case. The concrete smoked and cracked - half of it was vaporized, too, but there was nothing below it but more concrete – well, not for another hundred and fifty feet, anyway. Dust drifted everywhere, obscuring his vision even more than the spots.

“Shut it off,” he yelled at last. The laser whined and powered down. He had the tremendous urge to just drop it, let it fall to the floor and break – but they might still need it. With effort, he pulled it back upright and set it carefully down on the table, then climbed warily off of it, pulling his jacket up over his face to try to avoid breathing in the dust.

The concrete in the centre of the room was still hot from where it had been almost molten. The room was entirely wrecked, and pieces of the ceiling were still crumbling off – slowly, but they were still coming. They needed to get out of here, _now_.

“Natasha?” he shouted up the tunnel.

 JARVIS was still dully repeating his words, and hers – but when she called back, “Nice plan,” this time he could hear her with his own ears.

The tunnel was an opening of light. They’d cut it at about a fifteen degree angle – it would still be quite a climb. But they needed some way to cool the rock –

At the top, Natasha appeared in the opening, lugging a heavy canister. She tipped it down and cracked it open. Mist poured off of the liquid that ran out and down, cracking the rock and heat on the upper level; Steve went in search of the compressed gas available down in the GRC, and ran into Rhodey coming back with just that. They grinned at each other, the wild grins of soldiers just out of combat zones.

“Give it a moment to clear out,” Natasha’s voice echoed down the tunnel, “then I’ll throw down the rope and harnesses.”

Cracks were still slowly spreading in the ceiling. He left Rhodey figuring out what he was doing with the nitrogen tanks, and went to secure the scientists. Roberts and Parks were shaking, running on nerves and adrenaline, but Steve ignored them – they were willing, at least. He walked over to Drenkov, instead, and ripped the duct tape free of his mouth and hands.

“You can come with us willingly or you can die down here,” Steve told him evenly.

“I’d rather die,” Drenkov spat.

“Right,” Steve muttered, and knocked him cold. Then, for good measure, he slapped the duct tape back over the man’s mouth, and looked up at the other two. “I assume neither of you want to stay?”

Parks shot Roberts a terrified look. “I can’t leave,” he implored the other scientist.

“JARVIS – stop repeating me,” Steve said, when JARVIS began to parrot his words back again. “I’m authorizing Dr. Parks to leave the premises in my company.”

_“You do not have authorization to make that request.”_

“Then who does?”

_“You do not have authorization to access that information.”_

Steve swore. From the other room, Rhodey called, “Hey, gentlemen, our ride’s here! Let’s go!”

“JARVIS,” Steve hesitated. He wasn’t sure it would work. Wasn’t sure it wouldn’t hurt the real JARVIS, back in Stark Tower – although it couldn’t possibly, right? Not with all communications down.

One life weighed against another, but lives couldn’t be compared.

He went with the odds, instead. “Skynet four-five-one.”

Drives hissed, melted. Computer screens flickered, and then, as one, all the lights went out, leaving them in total darkness. Steve grabbed his flashlight and flicked it on; it cast a visible beam through the dark, illuminating the dust in the air – thinner, in this room, but still present.

The stack of pages he’d printed out over the last few days went into his shield case, the shield went on his arm, and Drenkov went over his shoulder. He shone the flashlight a few feet away from the scientists’ feet, in the direction of the hallway. “Let’s go.” The absence of JARVIS’ echo seemed like a condemnation.

Rhodey had found something to use to wear his flashlight as a headlamp; it looked awkward and bulky on his head, but it seemed to do the job, as he dug harnesses out of a large black backpack that hadn’t been present before. No wondering about where that had come from; a rope hung down from the hole in the roof. Rhodey dug out a radio and headset, too, and tossed them to Steve, who barely managed to catch them without dropping his flashlight. He did drop Drenkov, after making sure there wasn’t any liquid nitrogen still lying around. The scientist was beginning to stir again – so Steve knelt down and hogtied him. He could only knock him out so many times in a brief period without permanently injuring him.

This was going to be difficult. But when had he ever taking the easy missions? He clipped the radio to his belt and put the headset on; it was laughably low-tech compared to SHIELD comms, but when he flicked it on and said, “Radio check,” Natasha’s voice came through – a bit scratchy, but clear enough to understand.

_“Check. Good. I’m hearing movement on the other channels – the, ah, super-zombies draw the hordes. I’m going to go secure our exit.”_

_“If you move away from that hole these radios aren’t going to work too well,”_ Rhodey said, his voice echoing in both the dusty room and Steve’s ear. There was no response. _“Natasha?”_

“Like you said,” Steve muttered, clipping Drenkov into a climbing harness. Roberts and Parks were both fumbling with theirs, so he ended up clipping them in, too, while Rhodey wrapped thinner ropes around the one stretching down – some kind of climbing knots. There was a fifth harness, for him, but Steve shoved it back in the pack, ignoring the assault rifles – Chinese make – and spare ammunition that were also in there. “Quicker if I just climb it and haul you all up.”

“You sure you don’t want a tether?”

“Too slow,” Steve shrugged. “You good here?”

“Go, man.”

The rope bit into his hands, but it wasn’t nearly bad enough to break skin; he didn’t bother with his feet, just hauled himself up hand-over-hand. When he got to the lip of the hole, he swung his feet forward until they caught on the edge, and leaned back – and then simply walked up it. In less than a minute, he was climbing out into the ruin of one of the fourth sublevel storage rooms.

Further up, a loud bang – a gunshot.

It smelled like death, up here.

“Natasha, sitrep.”

 _“We have company.”_ Her voice was terse.

“Shoot to wound.”

_“Shut up and get them out, Steve.”_

He bit back a retort, and instead said, “Rhodey, you all clipped in?”

_“What, all? Jesus, they weren’t kidding about the superstrength. Give me a minute to get myself added to the chain.”_

Another gunshot. “We have company,” he repeated Natasha’s words.

_“Damn. I’m good. Haul away.”_

He dragged the rope up and around to the overhanging side of the hole before he started seriously pulling it up; the tunnel sides were metal and broken concrete, and he didn’t want to drag the rope across that. It didn’t take much longer than it had for him to climb it by himself. Roberts popped out first, followed by Parks, and then Rhodey with one hand on Drenkov to steer him away from the sharp edges of the tunnel. Rhodey’s headlight illuminated the details that even Steve’s night vision hadn’t been able to pick out: an enormous scorch mark down one wall, the way the door to the stairwell had been blown off its hinges.

Several more gunshots were fired as Steve hauled them up over the edge, and the scientists flinched like startled deer. Shock was beginning to set in, Steve could see, by the glassy looks on their faces.

Rhodey pulled out the assault rifles, checked one, and tossed the other to Steve. Steve tossed it back. “I’ll have my hands full.” He picked up Drenkov and slung him over his shoulder – the man was unconscious again, he noted.

“He started struggling on the way up,” Rhodey shrugged, catching Steve’s look. “You sure?”

“I’m good.”

 _“If you’re finally done.”_ Natasha sounded exasperated.

Rhodey slung the spare rifle and ammunition over his shoulders, double-checked the pack, and then dropped it down the hole. Three gunshots sounded, rapid-fire, above. “We’re on our way up.”

He took point, with the scientists after him and Steve right behind. He was so close on Parks’ heels that when the man suddenly collapsed on the stair, Steve nearly tripped over him.

“Shit, what now?” Rhodey didn’t turn, keeping his attention focused forward.

Roberts twitched away. “Oh, god.”

“Stroke,” Steve guessed grimly, dumping Drenkov to one side and kneeling to feel Parks’ neck for a pulse. His eyes were still wide open, frightened – and motionless. Dead. “ _Damn_ it.” He’d thought it would be in JARVIS’ control, thought they’d – _damn_ it. _Damn_ Tony, what the _hell_ – _Damn it._

They’d had no choice. Leaving him behind, no possibility for extraction, would have been a slow death. Knowing that didn’t lessen the guilt.

The gunshots were coming more regularly, now. _“We have to go,”_ said Natasha’s voice in ear.

“Steve,” said Rhodey.

“Yeah.” Gently, with his fingertips, he pushed Parks’ eyes closed.

Sixty-eight years since he’d done that for an enemy.

Drenkov was beginning to stir. Steve stood, picked him up, and started walking, choking him out at the same time; when he’d gone limp again, Steve tossed him over his shoulder, and used his spare hand to push Roberts forward. The scientist was even more glassy-eyed, face slick with sweat, stumbling on each stair.

The stench of death grew stronger, then overpowering on the next landing. Rhodey’s flashlight illuminated a pair of corpses shoved into the corner, neat bullet holes through their foreheads and the backs of their skulls blown off – Natasha’s work. Passing by so close made Steve want to gag. Gaping sores covered half their visible skin, some of them broken open and displaying dried green pus; smaller pustules clustered about the sores, turned every colour but a natural one in death – although the flashlight probably made the effect worse, Steve had to allow. Their eyes stared, but even those hadn’t been left alone by extremis – they’d grown pustules just the same as skin. Lumps under the remaining normal skin hinted that the damage hadn’t been all external, either.

The first sublevel hallway was a much worse mess than the fourth, walls and floor covered in scorch marks and debris from the labs strewn over the floor. The doors had all been torn off of their hinges - had that been the super-zombie, or just the press of ordinary zombies made in the initial rush? Enough of those unfortunates littered the floor now, downed by more head shots. Roberts lost control of himself and retched all over the first one; Steve pulled his jacket up over his nose. Blood and pus carpeted the floor in a way that made Steve want to boil himself in water.

Oh God, what had they unleashed?

At the far end of the hall, the steel blast door that had been protecting the way in still stood, but there was an enormous hole in the roof; even from down the hall Steve could see that the concrete and steel had been layered several feet deep, but apparently it hadn’t been thick enough. Beneath it was a pile of bodies. Natasha was standing halfway down the hall, not bothering with cover; she had a Type 81 aimed at the hole in the roof, an attached light on, and belts of spare ammunition over her shoulders. As Steve paused to wait for Roberts, a woman fell down through the hole in the ceiling and began picking herself up off of the mound of corpses with robotic jerkiness. She moaned, low and groaning; there was an enormous gaping sore across her throat, blistering open. Half her face seemed to be rotting; as she stood fully, part of her left cheek fell off, landing on the pile with a small _splat_ that probably wasn’t audible to anyone but Steve.

Natasha shot her in the head.

Steve wanted to start retching, himself; instead, he grabbed Roberts and half-carried him down the hall, still puking up bile. “Got a way up there without getting bitten?” Rhodey asked, standing beside Natasha and taking aim.

Natasha reloaded. “Rope’ll be too slow. Could use a boost.”

Steve closed his eyes, and set his jaw before he opened them again. “Right,” he said grimly, and passed Drenkov to Rhodey, then stepped over to the hole. He flinched to the side when another zombie fell down and Natasha blew that one’s head off, too. Oh, God. Where was the line between cruelty and mercy? He didn’t know anymore.

To get underneath the hole - and as he drew nearer, he saw that he _had_ to be underneath it; it was nearly six feet thick - he had to step on corpses, which gave unevenly beneath his feet. He breathed in through his mouth – thus reducing the urge to vomit to something only barely ignorable - and tried to ignore the squishiness, then nodded to Nat.

She clicked the safety on her gun and ran, boosted herself off of the debris, and jumped, balling herself up so that she didn’t hit the ceiling; her feet came down squarely on the shield and Steve tossed her upward, at a slight enough angle that she’d clear the hole and land on the edge. At the same time a zombie fell down the hole from the opposite side, the most rotted-looking one he’d seen yet, in a worse condition than the corpses on the floor - Steve backed away as it reached for him, the movement awkward and hindered by the bodies spread out all around them. It was too close to him for Rhodey to fire, especially one-handed; Steve swung his shield at the poor man’s torso, intending to push him backward, but instead cut straight through the decomposing flesh. The top half of the torso and head backward; when the head hit the floor, it broke open like a rotten melon. Steve felt his eyes roll back in his head and had to bite his tongue, hard enough to taste blood, to prevent himself from doubling over and vomiting.

Above, there was rapid gunfire, and then near-silence as Natasha reloaded quickly - and then more silence.

“Come on, you,” Rhodey said, clicking the safety onto his gun and letting it drop to the harness as he pulled Roberts forward. He passed Drenkov to Steve, who grabbed him by the belt and the back of his shirt, swung him back, then forward and _up_ to land near the edge. The follow through motion made Steve reel – or rather, the smell of corpses did that, pressing in over a wave of dizziness. He shook his head.

“You gonna be okay to toss me?” Rhodey asked, frowning.

Probably. Maybe not. “Yeah,” Steve said, because what other choice did they have?

“Oh, god, oh, god,” Roberts was muttering as Rhodey climbed. Steve bent and held the shield up again, flat; Rhodey got one knee onto it, balancing himself with a hand on Steve’s shoulder, and then Steve boosted him upwards. From the sounds of it he didn’t manage to land gracefully, but a few seconds later he joined Natasha in picking off zombies, so he must have been okay.

“What he did,” Steve told Roberts, who was as pale as a sheet.

The scientist shuffled over the corpses, only to be sick again, retching and bringing up nothing at all - there was nothing left in his stomach, and watching him gag over the bodies nearly set Steve off. By the time he was done, the sound of gunfire had returned to a more leisurely pace, but Rhodey called down, sounding stressed, “Be sick later, get out of the hole now!”

Steve shook his head, picked the now-kneeling Roberts up by the belt of his pants, and, the same way he’d tossed Drenkov, threw Roberts upward through the hole. Then he leaped upwards himself, jumping high enough to catch the rim of the hole and haul himself out one-handed.

They were in another hallway, one covered mostly by corpses. Steve swayed, feeling light-headed.

“You need to eat,” Natasha said, as suddenly _there_ as she hadn’t been before. She held out a can to him - beef and potato stew, meant to be heated in a pot or something. He hadn’t seen or heard her opening it, but he didn’t care; nausea and aching hunger curled together in his gut and he threw up himself, barely managing to avoid Natasha and aim at the hole instead. When he was done, she handed him a water bottle, and he rinsed out his mouth and spat with his eyes closed so that he wouldn’t see the bodies below.

She pressed the can back into his hands, next, and he felt so light-headed that he tipped his head back and gulped it down, getting tomato stains all over his face. The dizziness rose and then faded almost immediately as soon as the thick, chemical flavour of the sauce hit his tongue. He made himself pause halfway through the can, belatedly remembering to pace himself, and saw Natasha taking a water bottle away from Roberts. “Not too much at once. You’ll make yourself sick again.”

Beside them, Rhodey fired, downing another zombie that had wandered into the hallway, and Steve flinched away from the sound. He wished he had his cowl - the earpiece of the radio provided no protection at all, especially when Rhodey was on the other side of him.

“We have to get out of here,” he said, becoming half-disgusted with the stew as his metabolism evened out and his surroundings slipped back into focus. “Is every one of them in the park coming here?”

“They get drawn by loud noises,” Natasha said. “If they weren’t so easy to kill, we’d be in trouble. As is, getting sufficient ammunition’s been the main problem.” Her face was emotionless as she said this - as emotionless as the bodies around them, the ones with little neat holes in their heads, as opposed to the larger-calibre bullets that Rhodey’s gun used. Those ones tended to lack recognizable faces.

“Out the back?” Rhodey suggested, Drenkov once more over his shoulder, and Natasha nodded, taking point. Steve went along without protest, downing the rest of the soup on the way before tossing the can aside, and dragging Roberts along with them.

“Flares?” he asked Natasha as they ducked behind a corner, waiting for Rhodey to move back and catch up. They needed to get to a section with intact doors, so they could pile up obstacles in front of the mindless infected and get away quietly.

“The first time I popped one, it brought down a super-zombie on me,” Natasha said. Steve hid a wince. She’d been in the middle of trying to explain that when Steve had realized just how lethally she was dealing with the infected. Now – now he didn’t know what to think. Everything felt so miserably _sick._

They jogged lightly down the hallway, Rhodey passing Drenkov off to Steve and then going backwards - easily so; they were more limited by Roberts’ huffing breaths. The other man was completely gone, glassy-eyed and barely compliant, but so long as he kept moving, Steve was content to leave him like that for now. Snapping his mind back to the present wouldn’t be much of a kindness, anyway.

“Can we set one off from a distance? Or - what about the radios?”

“I’m good, man, but I’m not Tony,” Rhodey said, and then grimaced at the phrase he’d use. “I mean - well, I mean that. I can make and break basic encryption, simple enough, but hacking onto SHIELD’s lines?” He shook his head, trading positions with Natasha to press up against the door; Steve saw him flick the switch to semi-auto, and then he gently pushed the door open, leading gun-first. A moment later, he waved them through, along with a hand signal to be silent.

Outside, it was semi-dark, the stars obscured by clouds - or by the smog - which reflected back the light of the dense urban population around them. Steve could make out shuffling shapes off in the distance as his eyes adjusted. The streetlamps were still lit - Natasha had said that the military had cut off the park, but Steve wasn’t surprised that there was more than one arc reactor housed here. Many of the lamps were no longer standing; there was a line of them knocked over, and some of them had been twisted into different shapes, no doubt by those superzombies who had been eager to test out their new power. The buildings were also lit only patchily, and even as Steve looked around, glass smashed and a light flickered out in a second-story window of the next building over.

“They don’t like light,” Natasha breathed into Steve’s ear. He nodded an affirmative.

They crossed over - not to the building with the recently-broken light, but the one past it, at one point sticking behind a corner for a full quarter-hour while a group of infected shuffled by, heading toward the R&D building. Roberts made a squeaking noise at the sight, and they all tensed, Steve grabbing him and sticking his hand over the scientist’s mouth - but none of the infected looked their way. Apparently squeaking was beneath their notice, or beyond it.

The building that they entered next had once had glass doors, but those had been smashed, glass laying out on the floor and covered in blood. Steve picked his way through it gingerly, keeping a close eye on Roberts to be sure he did the same; if he slipped and fell... the serum might give Steve a fighting chance against extremis, but he certainly didn’t want to try it. Moreover, there was the problem of noise; the sharp crunch of further-shattering glass brought an interested zombie their way, until Natasha took its head off cleanly with a garrote, surging out of the darkness and wrapping the razorwire around its throat before it got anywhere near them. Pus and blood squirted outward from the severed neck, but she’d angled it to spray harmlessly away from her.

“Upstairs,” she mouthed after, all-but-invisible in the darkness. They crept up stairs, and finally, past doors that hadn’t been shattered - these were steel without windows, and the inability to see past them meant that they nearly walked into another group of infected. Rhodey kicked the first in the stomach to get it away while Steve and Natasha surged into the fight with shield and wire, dispatching the three with brutal efficiency. They proceeded forward, leaving the bodies and heads on the floor behind them, along with the blood spatters. Steve grimaced. If they kept this up, one of them was going to get exposed sooner or later. They checked each other over, after, for flecks of blood or pus that might have gotten on their faces and dangerously near to eyes, nose, or mouth. Natasha and Rhodey had to do most of the inspecting; Steve’s vision still had too many black spots in it.

They found a room with intact doors - thankfully, one had a small window - and barricaded themselves in, flicking the lights off. “Keep quiet,” Natasha murmured in a low voice, which barely carried over the few feet separating them. “This isn’t a safe a place to rest.”

Steve nodded, and then thankfully took another can of stew from her, putting Drenkov down to the side. She’d pulled her gloves off, first, before she cracked it open, but he didn’t have any gore on his hands. The first can hadn’t been enough; he still felt light and weak, shaky. She tossed another to Rhodey and went around him to give one to Roberts, too, although she had to cup his hands around it and force it to his face before he started eating it.

“Signal a pickup, or take our chances with the Chinese,” Steve quietly listed their options.

Natasha shook her head. “After what a couple of those super-zombies did? They shoot at any movement. Signal. We need a way to pass a message without being caught at the point. Remote flares - you can rig something to set them off, right?” She looked to Rhodey.

“SHIELD click codes,” Steve suggested. “Leave them on one roof, time them for when we’re on another, or remote control.”

Rhodey nodded slowly. “I can use my phone as a timer. But with the connection down, remote’ll be a lot harder to - ”

“Oh, god,” Roberts said, his voice shockingly loud compared to theirs. Steve felt like he could hear it echoing from all corners of the room. “They’re - ” he got no further than that, because Steve surged forward and slapped his hand tightly across Roberts’ mouth, silencing him.

“I said keep _quiet,_ ” Natasha snapped, her voice never rising above a low murmur in volume, but carrying more than enough threat to silence the bravest of men. But maybe Roberts was just as insane as Drenkov, because he paid no heed to her words; instead he shook his head, violently enough to slightly dislodge Steve’s hand - and then he _bit_ at it, his teeth sinking into the meat of Steve’s palm, hard enough to break serum-toughened skin. Hard enough to _hurt_. Steve pulled his hand away, dripping blood, and kicked Roberts’ legs out from under him; in a flash Natasha was on him, her garrote pulled around his neck and _up_.

“What the - ” Steve mumbled to himself, staring at his hand - and then he _knew_. Roberts had thrown up, had been kneeling on corpses - or maybe he’d just gotten spattered by blood while playing bystander to a fight, gotten a droplet in his mouth or eye. And now he’d bitten Steve and slobbered all over the wound. _Hell._

“Damn it,” Rhodey swore softly.

Natasha climbed to her feet and eyed Steve warily. “The serum,” she said. “It might not be - ”

“Doesn’t matter,” Steve said, shaking his head. How long did he have? How long had it taken Roberts to be taken over by it? It could have been only a few minutes ago that he was exposed - it certainly hadn’t been more than a half-hour.

“It does,” Natasha replied, her voice low and intense. “We need you. SHIELD needs you.”

“Too bad. Give me some of those cans,” he told her, and she passed them over wordlessly, along with a pair of water bottles. He shoved them into his jacket pockets - they bulged uncomfortably, but they fit, and he remembered in time to unsling his shield case and pass it to her. “Papers and drives in there. Make sure Fury gets those. If I’m not - if I can radio you later, I will.”

“Steve – ” Rhodey broke off. What was he going to say? That it wasn’t Steve’s fault, again? Steve shook his head sharply.

Natasha spoke for him instead. “Come back alive.”

“You should get out of here, too,” Steve replied, voice low, and he didn’t look back as he left. His hand itched. If he came after them... Oh, Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, please let him not.

He jogged out of the building at his own pace: fast, too fast; his stomach protested the beef stew sitting in it. He ignored it; he had to get away. He had to get away, and hole up, and see if he was still sane come dawn. It couldn’t be too far away. The shadows were lighter already, the colours of the plants and buildings brightening. It made it difficult to keep to the side, away from the shambling infected that continued to wander about aimlessly, but even when he turned a corner and nearly ran smack into a group of them, they paid him no attention. Pus oozed down from their faces, thick and viscous, and such a sickly shade of green that it left every part of Steve feeling unclean.

Shrinking back against the wall, he watched them pass by, and then continued to head south. Away. He had to get away – he had to give Natasha and Rhodey a chance to get away – his hand itched, and he couldn’t resist scratching it any longer; his nails tore at his skin and the itch increased, intensified even as the scratching soothed something. Blood dripped to the ground. Hit. _Plunk._

It was as loud as a car backfiring; Steve dove for cover, and nearly brained himself on his shield, all his coordination vanishing. Desperately, he crawled for cover, backing up, until he found himself pressed up against a giant’s leg. He rolled away, but the creature loomed over him, large and unforgiving, blotting out the sky above. His shield – he needed the shield, the shield –

But his balance was shot; his fumbling fingers couldn’t even get the shield unstrapped from his arm. There was a roaring in his ears, drowning out everything including his equilibrium, and he scrabbled at his ears and ripped them off but the noise in his head wouldn’t die. It was like he’d spun in a circle twenty times while somebody yelled at him through a bullhorn. Like he’d lain down next to the tracks and listened to the trains speed by, or like the wind against the door of an open plane, or the Iron Man suit breaking the sound barrier –

Something hit, landed nearby – the giant fell, obliterated, burning. Steve squinted up at his rescuer, who stared down at him with glowing eyes. “Tony?” he rasped. The roaring in his head hadn’t diminished now that Tony had landed – he must have done something to the arc reactor, over-clocked it somehow, to get that much power out of it so continuously. But Tony was a genius. Tony would know – when Steve was the most lost, that was when Tony was in his element. “Help,” he managed.

“Five things are impossible,” Tony said. His voice was distorted – more distorted than it usually was. The vocal filters – they were different; the suit was new; that was why it loomed so much, bloody and red. He reached down a hand to help Steve to his feet, and Steve grabbed it – but it was the giant that held his hand when he looked again, and Steve stumbled backward, gasping for breath. Heat swam in his vision, lighting up Tony like a furnace and bathing the giant in cool – what was it Thor had called them? Jotuns. Frost giants. Steve backed away and the giant let him – where was Tony? He’d left Tony behind –

The ground was shaking, the stench of death rising from the rents in the earth. There was so much death, here, in this city where he’d failed; a bombed out husk of its former glory, home to shades who got drunk on looted wine. He staggered along the shattered road, into the church – he could pray for forgiveness, beg forgiveness, although he knew he’d never find it, but perhaps someone might smite him – Oh Lord, forgive Your wretched child – forgive me, Father, I have sinned – I have trespassed against You. The church radiated heat; the church was on fire. All the dark spots in his vision had faded and he could see only the flames.

“Never worship an idol,” said Tony, behind him, sounding like the old Father at the church in Brooklyn, and Steve fell against the altar. It broke beneath his weight. “There’s no improving on perfection.” Tony reached out a hand, bare fingers brushing against Steve’s cheek as Steve stared back at him, struggling to breathe past the guilt in his throat.

“Tony,” he gasped. His lungs were in agony. Why couldn’t he breathe? Air was moving in and out of him, but no oxygen reached him – it was worse than the asthma, when he’d not been able to make his muscles cooperate, chest spasming like his whole body was now.

“Whisper into the dark,” Tony murmured to him, while Steve tried to reach out to him and failed, failed to grab at his suit jacket – _so close._ If only he could reach Tony, then he could breathe – spots danced in his vision, achingly bright and beautiful. Like Tony, his mouth, so close to Steve’s ear, breathing reassurance as the darkness closed over him.

_“I promise something’s listening.”_

 

 

 

_Fire. Agony. Burning._

 

 

 _A scream. High, loud - more voices, joining it,_ shrieking -

Steve woke.

He was on his feet before he consciously registered the motion - or maybe he’d fallen asleep on his feet and had never actually lain down. Those were people screaming, those were – not people. _Flares_. He stumbled, hit a wall, leaned on it for support as his head swam with the sudden movement. His body felt weak and achy all over, like that winter when he’d been too sick to go to school, and all he’d done was stay in bed all day and cough endlessly, trying to clear his lungs enough to breathe. Even when the illness had finally passed he’d felt weak, a tiredness that hadn’t vanished until he’d stepped out of the Vita-Ray chamber.

“Natasha,” he tried, automatically reaching for the radio headset - but it wasn’t there. Frantically, Steve patted at himself, glancing around where he’d woken up - but there was nothing; it was just an office, messy from filing cabinets knocked over, glass strewn over the floor; the light-bulb in the ceiling was shattered. Damn it, when had he lost the radio? Where? No, that didn’t matter - he needed to find out where he was _now_ , or he was going to miss his ride out.

He was in a building, somewhere, but although the world no longer resembled the nightmarish funhouse of his half-remembered fever dreams, he had no idea where in the park he was. He ran down the corridor, ignoring the weakness of his body, searching for an exit and cursing his inability to read Mandarin when he saw a sign hanging from the ceiling. Going outside would be useless - he wanted to go _up_ , he needed a vantage point. Unless he wasn’t in a tall building -

He threw open a door at random, and the room it led to had a window; Steve ran over, saw that it wasn’t designed to open, and smashed it with his shield, then stuck his head out and looked up. No good – he was on the top floor, and it was only three stories up. But he could easily jump that. The air whistled past his ears as he dropped, landing in a crouch a few dozen yards away from a group of zombies. As one, they turned from where they’d been headed - probably in the direction of the flares - toward him.

At their shuffling pace, he could afford to ignore them, even as weak as he was. Instead he focused on his surroundings, setting off into a quick jog as he looked for the highest building in his immediate vicinity. There - across the way, there was something six or seven stories tall, which looked a story higher than its neighbour. He sprinted for it, just as a horde of infected began shambling out through its broken glass doors.

Steve didn’t pause; he just grabbed his shield in one hand and threw it, underhand, aimed not to _cut_ but to _hit_. It ricocheted among them like a bowling ball among pins, knocking them to the ground, and he caught it on the last rebound as he jumped through the doors, kicking a zombie that stood in his way in the chest and dropping him, too. Running made his blood pump, chased some of the weakness away, but made his head swim more, too. Stairs - there had to be stairs nearby –

Fortunately, the next sign he saw in this building had a pictogram - Steve ran for the stairwell and up it, blood thrumming in his veins. The screams of the flares had stopped - would Natasha and Rhodey be on a far roof, watching, or would they be hiding under cover? They wouldn’t be at the location of the flares, that was for sure. That had been enough flares that there had to have been some sort of code embedded in it - and he’d missed it.

He burst out onto the roof, nearly taking the hinges off of the door in the process; it swung back too far and collided with the concrete wall beside it with a loud _bang_. Noise would attract the infected - but so long as it didn’t attract one of the enhanced zombies, if there were any of them left in the city, he’d be okay...

As if in response to this thought, a gout of flame burst from a rooftop about a quarter-mile away. He plastered himself back against the stairwell housing, knowing that if he could see that from this distance, then whoever it was could almost certainly see him. Another gout of flame, and Steve squinted at it, trying not to be blinded by the light itself and rather see what it was illuminating, but that was a futile hope. It looked just like any of the other roofs about - a small park, maybe. The roof Steve was on held several tennis courts, with nets still stretched across them.

If that had been where the flares were set off, then that would _not_ be where Natasha and Rhodey were. He scanned the other rooftops, looking for dark figures, but could see none that didn’t have the shambling movements of the infected, drifting toward the light; as he watched, several of them fell over the edges of their rooftops, presumably splattering when they landed below.

There was no way they’d make themselves visible before the last possible second - not with that super-zombie watching. SHIELD would be by in a matter of minutes, now that they knew where in the city to land, but they’d be cloaked - Steve scanned the skies, but he knew it was futile. The clouds and the smog were thick enough to provide SHIELD with plenty of cover. Their pick-up might already have arrived.

If he wanted to survive, he had to get them to notice him. Time to take a chance. Steve hefted his shield, closed the stairwell door, and smacked the two together in rapid succession, _bong-bong-bong_ , followed by a pause and two more slams immediately after - SHIELD code. The sound vibrated out into the night - Steve ran for the far ledge from the super-zombie, one eye on the ground, one eye peeled for flares. They might not be able to risk launching a flare of their own, or they might -

Instinct had him dropping and rolling off of the ledge, scrabbling at it so he wouldn’t fall away - he barely grabbed the window edge two floors down, jarring his hands painfully and scraping the skin off of his fingers, but arresting his momentum. Fire bloomed out over-top of him, and Steve let go, falling another two stories before catching himself, just long enough to slow down, before he dropped all the way to the ground.

There was a _thud_ , and the super-zombie landed beside him - a young woman, her eyes glowing red in the darkness. She was pretty, slight - Steve knew she was probably strong enough to rip his arms off. He backed away warily.

She laughed, and darted forward. He barely got the shield up in time to absorb her punch - if hadn’t been vibranium, he would have gone flying. Instead, the lack of effect she’d had seemed to confuse her, and she backed off, snarling something in Chinese.

“I don’t understand you,” Steve said warily. She didn’t have the multiple voices that the other one had had, the one he’d cut to shreds with the laser.

“We do,” she said in perfect English, and ran _around_ him, with blinding speed; Steve whirled and tried to line up the shield, but didn’t make it in time. Her foot hit his arm and slammed it against his chest, tossing him several dozen feet, across the road and into the side of the building next door. He gasped for breath against the black spots in his vision; something had gone _crunch_ in his chest, making every breath a laborious act, his muscles spasming from the strain. His arm felt like it had been lit up with pain; he couldn’t move the fingers on that hand.

She was standing right above him, having dashed forward again with that incredible speed. He rolled over, ignoring the way it caused the black spots to multiply, and kicked out, trying to trip her, to distract her, but she jumped into the air - jumped a _couple dozen feet_ into the air - and landed again out of the way, nimbly, like a cat. Steve grabbed the shield with his other hand and stumbled to his feet, gritting his teeth against the agonizing pain in his shattered arm.

“You’re outdated,” she said, like it was a personal triumph. “We’re better than you. Faster than - _aaiiiighhhhh - ”_

Lightning poured down around her, white and blinding; wide streaks of Steve’s vision were obscured by the after-image of it. He heard more than saw her whirl around, snarling again, and jump at something coming crashing down out of the sky - Thor, Steve realized, when the god went flying past him, crashing and rolling along the road and off of it, into a tree which fell beneath his weight. There was a blur and the extremis-enhanced woman stood in front of him, her fists moving too fast to see clearly as she pummelled at him with far more force than her frame and mass should have allowed, until Thor swatted her away.

She hit the ground on all fours and charged right back at him, completely ignoring Steve now, and Steve almost thought he blinked, events happened so fast: Thor shifted to the side with perfect timing, too fast for Steve to have caught the movement, and brought Mjolnir down upon the woman’s head, with enough force that the hammer pulped most of her upper torso, too.

Steve closed his eyes and tried to breathe, slowly, against the pain in his ribs and the agony in his arm. He opened them again when he heard Thor walking toward him - not with superhuman speed, anymore. “You have great timing,” Steve wheezed.

“Heimdall told me of your plight,” Thor said, looking at him in concern. “I am sorry I could not arrive sooner.”

“Nah, y’did fine,” Steve said. He was feeling light-headed again.

“This place is no longer fit for man or woman.” Thor began to spin his hammer, faster and faster until it was a blur of motion. “We must go.” He pulled Steve’s good arm around his neck, and grabbed him about the waist - carefully, but then they took off, and the wind pushed Steve’s shattered arm from half-bent to flat against his side.

Lightning spiked through his brain, a billion different points of light, and everything went dark.


	3. The Valley of Spirits

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His arm hurt. Groggily, he tried to raise it – there was noise, something loud, and ice flooded his veins. Water rushed over him and he held his breath, hanging onto hope for one last moment before the cold took him, and he breathed in -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 “Hey, Steve.”

He opened his eyes. The ceiling above him was - white, but brightly coloured, with many large blotches of bright paint, which seemed to leap off of like arrows. The bed he was lying on was ridiculously comfortable, soft without being too soft - he could feel the fabric of the sheet against his skin. Ocean waves rocked his bed and calmed him, the salt mingling on his lips with blood.

Somebody put an ice chip in his mouth, and he sucked on it for a bit before swallowing and being given another. It seemed the best course of action. Not much was making sense.

“Yeah, he’s still out of it,” another voice said, booming and echoing, far too deep. Steve made a face at it. He preferred the first speaker. Why couldn’t he see anything? All he could see were the colours, coming at him...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next time he woke, the ceiling was the usual dull colour, with the usual light fixtures. There were no splotches of paint, 3D or otherwise, and his arm throbbed with a dull ache in time to his heartbeat. The hospital bed was perfectly stable and not underwater. He turned his head, slightly, and saw Clint sitting in a chair beside him, attention focused on a laptop.

“What - ” he tried to say, but he didn’t even manage to get the word fully out before he started coughing.

“Shit, here,” Clint said, quickly putting the laptop down and raising a cup with a straw to his mouth. Steve sipped, cautiously, and the dryness in his throat eased. “Sorry.” Clint looked tired, the bags under his eyes too pronounced - when had he gotten back from Asgard? With Thor? Or had that all been part of the strange dreams? Steve had been bitten, and then...?

“Everybody’s fine, before you ask,” Clint continued. “Nat and Rhodey got out fine, along with that lunatic, Drenkov - I came back with Thor, he dropped me off before flying out to help. Asgard was a waste of time, by the way. Fucking magic. You’ve been asleep three and a half days - man, anybody else would’ve lost the arm below the elbow, you did a number on it.”

Steve glanced down at his arm and struggled to sit up. Shit. How much damage had he done to it? Raising his head made him feel dizzy again - so he was still drugged with _something_ , then.

Clint pushed a button that made the head of the bed rise, and Steve slumped back against it gratefully. “Don’t worry about it,” Clint said cheerfully. “I said anybody else - docs here think that you’ll heal up in a few more days with no problems - and that after you spent sixteen hours in surgery, digging out all the little bits and pieces. And no chance of you being a zombie, when anyone else would be munching on brains by now. I am _envious_ , let me tell you.”

Steve closed his eyes and let relief creep over him. A few days - he _was_ lucky. “Where are we?”

“Helicarrier,” Clint told him, holding up the cup again. Steve took it with his good hand, which felt strangely wobbly, and held it, sipping occasionally while Clint continued, “We’re two hundred miles off of Hong Kong - Chinese government pitched a fit after the extraction, ordered everybody out. Fury wasn’t happy, but international politics are pretty hair-trigger, so. And hey, it turns out that EM shielding is useful for hiding from human eyes, too – Bruce finished taking the Tower’s doohickies apart while you were in Shenzhen, figured ‘em out, and broke it down so the SHIELD techs could understand.” He turned grim. “Chinese government’s still got the entire place under quarantine, which is working about as well as trying to hold water in a sieve. Thor’s off chasing down the super-zombies - he keeps trying to bring ‘em back alive, but he hasn’t managed to yet, and they’re killing a lot of people whenever they pop up. Worse thing is that they’re _infecting_ other people. China’s got half a dozen quarantined spots, now, their entire border is on lock-down, air travel’s down - it’s like the SARS thing turned up to nine thousand.”

SARS? Every so often Steve would think he was getting caught up, or that it didn’t matter if he wasn’t caught up, and then someone would reference something he knew nothing about. It added to the helpless frustration, the slow-boiling rage curling in his gut.

He closed his eyes and breathed in, deep, through his nose, and out through his mouth, meditatively. If he didn’t move on, he was going to lose it entirely.

His gaze wound up on the cast on his arm, and now that he actually looked at it, he realized that somebody had drawn on the thing. _Multiple_ somebodies. He lifted it gingerly, then with a bit more confidence when it didn’t hurt any more than it already was, and inspected the drawings. A scribbled formula - he immediately thought _Tony_ , because Bruce didn’t share Tony’s habit of writing on random surfaces, before his mind caught up again, and he had to look away. A word in Russian, an extremely large and anatomically correct dick and balls - Steve looked pointedly at Clint, who grinned unrepentantly. “Tradition.”

“Uh-huh,” Steve said, refraining from rolling his eyes. There was nothing from Rhodey on the cast – what did that mean? Or was it just that the man still wasn’t officially an Avenger? Maybe he was over-thinking it. “What was on the drives we got out?” he asked, returning to their earlier discussion. “One of them had Hansen’s work.”

“Some of it, but apparently the woman is just that much of a genius. Who, like any aspiring villain, did not include a shut-off switch. We’ve got the best people in the world looking at it and they’re coming up with nothing.” Clint shook his head.

“But Drenkov – ”

“Wasn’t working on extremis. SHIELD’s burying him, though – and not in a lab. You should’ve seen Bruce’s face when he was reviewing the transcripts from Natasha’s go at him, it was... uh, pretty scary, actually.” Clint looked thoughtful.

The pain in his arm - literal and figurative - made Steve irritable, made him want to snap, but he took a deep breath and forced himself to calm; the situation wasn’t Clint’s fault. And black humour was just his way of coping. “What about Hansen, Borjigin? Shapanka?” Damn it, was there _any_ good news? Sure, they had Drenkov, but he hadn’t working on extremis.

“No sign of them.”

“Great,” Steve muttered, taking another sip of water to forestall himself from saying more. It didn’t really work. “So what’s the plan – trap them all like rats and wait for them to die, with Thor to clobber any of ‘em that escape?”

Clint raised his eyebrows at the venom in Steve’s voice, and his tone while replying was deliberately light. “Well, the Council wants to nuke the Park, but that’s a terrible idea and Fury refused, and everybody remembers what happened the last time he refused to nuke somebody. Better idea than just waiting for them all to spill out, though. I’d swear none of these people had ever seen a zombie movie.” He picked up his laptop and changed the subject. “Could use your report, if you’re up to debriefing.”

Steve grimaced, but he knew it had to be done, and sooner rather than later. They’d have Rhodey’s report, of course, but a first-hand account was always valuable. He described the files and devices that he’d seen – Clint had all the pictures Rhodey had taken on the laptop, so he could easily narrate them.

When he got to the pictures of Parks’ strange platform, Clint’s expression went dull – hiding something. Steve raised an eyebrow at him, until he pulled up another picture, of a different but similar setup, one that Steve hadn’t seen before. There were only subtle differences; the grid of the platform was wider, and the bays of computers positioned much further back, visible only at the edge of the picture. The circular laser apparatus was a nearly exact match – perhaps a bit smaller – as were the reflection panels at the other end.

“Not a perfect copy,” Steve said.

“But nearly, at least on the outside. That’s SHIELD’s current version of the portal generator,” Clint explained. “Doesn’t make a lot of sense. Tony was helping out on SHIELD’s, consulting - hell, he manufactured half the parts for it. Dunno why he thought he needed his own.”

“There were a lot of secrets down there,” Steve said, and he told Clint about the trip out, about Parks falling and dying between the space of one breath and the next. “I thought – I thought that without JARVIS to send a signal – ” but no, he hadn’t been thinking, had he? The obvious was staring him in the face, now that he wasn’t stupid from adrenaline and nausea and hunger. JARVIS hadn’t had access to the facility when Lu and Nevsky had died. He’d risked Skynet for nothing. “Is he – is he okay? JARVIS,” he clarified.

Clint’s gaze slid to the side, and Steve let out a breath. Disbelief curled over the facts, shielding him for now from his own guilt – but it was there, it would be there. He’d injured JARVIS – maybe killed him – and all for nothing.

“Not your fault,” Clint said firmly, reading the look on his face, and adding, “No, seriously, it wasn’t you. World’s been fucked up, the last few days. It’s not just the zombie apocalypse – although maybe it is, maybe Hansen thought JARVIS might be able to shut extremis down. We’re pretty sure it was one of Tony’s pet scientists, at least – they launched a virus into the system, took out half the satellites in orbit, fucked up global communications – it’s been a complete fucking mess. It was why SHIELD didn’t get you out earlier, Chinese government be damned – ”

Their communications. So that’s why they hadn’t been able to get in contact with SHIELD, even after Natasha cut off Lu’s jammer.

A half-century of history, recently learned, unfolded in his brain; nuclear powers, held at bay by the thread of mutually assured destruction, with insufficient communication hampering their efforts to avoid the brink. “Tell me this isn’t the start of World War Three,” Steve said quietly. He felt dull, hollowed out, like all the anticipation had washed out of him and left nothing behind.

New York burned to ashes in his mind.

“Not yet. – No, really, it’s not. It’s been tense,” Clint admitted, “But they had communications back up by the time I got back from Asgard.”

Steve breathed.

In, out.

Not yet.

He swallowed, and struggled to turn his thoughts to smaller matters. Something more comprehensible. “And JARVIS?”

Clint shook his head.

 “He must have another backup - ”

“Not that we can find. Most of ‘em got smoked by Skynet the first time round, except for a few skeleton versions.” Clint winced. “You’ve interacted with one of those.”

“But he wouldn’t have just – ”

“Steve,” there was a glint of compassion in Clint’s eyes, but no room for misunderstanding. “He didn’t. Bruce explained – he’d have needed special hardware, and all the hardware specs were stored in drives that Skynet nuked. There was no way.”

Steve looked away, looked down. Damn it. JARVIS, the last of Tony’s creations, permanently reduced to that... almost mindless thing. _Damn_ it.

“Steve,” Clint said, and there was something uncomfortably soft in his voice. “We’re none of us angels. You know that. That’s why you’re our leader.”

Steve shook his head. “I thought - I thought better of him,” he managed to get out, past the lump in his threat. “I thought he knew that there was a line, one we don’t cross - we can’t cross. But all this time, he’s been - ” he grimaced and shook his head. His throat felt dry again; it was hard to swallow. Their interference might have fucked up the situation beyond all repair; maybe extremis would have gone off the rails without Steve and Rhodey breaking in, or maybe the scientists would have stayed in line. Maybe, without Tony helping them with the programming, they’d have never gotten so far along with extremis. Steve felt inadequate for the task of assessing all the might-have-beens.

Clint shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Steve, he wasn’t - he wasn’t exactly acting... rationally,” he said carefully. “I mean, it seemed like it came out of nowhere, but all this? Started six months ago. Right after the invasion.”

“I’ve seen men come through war and turn... different,” Steve said quietly. “That doesn’t mean they’re not at fault for things they do after.”

“Not what I was getting at,” Clint said, and looked away. Steve looked at him in confusion, until finally, still not meeting Steve’s eyes, Clint blurted, “Look, this is all – insane. Alien-level insane, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. The Cube. I looked at it and it showed me... things. Everything seemed so clear.”

“But that was... that wasn’t the Cube, that was - the alien,” Steve said, the drugs making him almost slip up and use Loki’s name aloud. Although maybe they weren’t tiptoeing around Asgardian spying anymore, if both Thor and Clint were back from Asgard. “I mean, if it was the Cube - we all looked at it at least once - ” Although maybe it was Loki. Maybe he’d influencing matters on Earth for months, if his cell wasn’t as secure as Thor claimed.

“No.” It seemed to take physical effort for Clint to force the words out. “It wasn’t him, he didn’t – his spear, it was connected to the Cube. The same type of energy. But it was the Cube that... showed us stuff.”

Right, that fit with what Steve had thought, but – “It was still him creating a connection,” Steve said gently.

“But what if that’s not the only way to get connected?” Clint met his eyes challengingly. “Tony went through that portal – that’s getting pretty up close and personal.”

Steve blinked, took what he’d thought he knew about the situation, and set it aside. Nobody else had reported getting knowledge from the Cube, that hadn’t been taken over by Loki – but none of the rest of them had gone through that portal. And after that meeting with Fury...

 “What?” Clint asked, looking at him knowingly.

“That first briefing after,” Steve said slowly. “The one he ran out of? Got pissed about JARVIS?” Jesus, Steve should have championed JARVIS then, shouldn’t have just sat there like an idiot. Now it was too late for anything. “Thor and I found him, after, he was staring at the Cube, and he asked – not us, he didn’t know we were there – he was wondering about dark energy. Talking to himself – I thought, anyway.”

Clint tapped his fingers on the laptop, thinking, and not looking too happy about it. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“He let it go,” Steve said, feeling like an idiot. “I gave him a cup of coffee and made him come have pizza with us, I didn’t think - I thought the mind-control was all L - the alien.”

“He saw something.” Clint said it like a statement of fact. “He definitely saw something.”

“But what?” Steve asked. “What would make him - ” he jabbed his left hand at the laptop containing his report, pointedly, grimacing when it made the IV line tug uncomfortably at his skin.

“Dunno,” Clint said. “I mean - I saw stuff, like the iridium, but acting on it, that was all - ” he gestured in a way that Steve took was meant to indicate Loki. “Still, we gotta let Bruce know about this, and Natasha - the, uh, icelandic guy - ” so apparently they still weren’t mentioning anyone connected to the Asgardians by name, “he’s a scientist, so maybe he got... something else. I mean, he never said, not in any of the reports I saw, but - ” he looked as frustrated as Steve felt. “There must be something.”

“Unless we’re just trying to excuse a friend,” Steve mumbled. It was so tempting, to hope that Thor had been mistaken...

Clint looked back at him, lips crooked into a smile. “Yeah, well. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve slept for most of the next day, his body still recuperating from the ordeal. Grief coiled about him, making his mind listless, and glad for the reprieve offered by unconsciousness. Tony, JARVIS... hundreds of thousands of civilians, innocents...

Shortly after 3am, he woke up to find Fury staring at him, which was... unsettling, but the continued supply of painkillers made it easy to go with. The medication was one benefit of still being stuck in medical, he had to admit; the SHIELD docs were happy to supply him with plenty of painkillers, since there was no chance he’d become addicted to any of them.

Blinking groggily, Steve fumbled for the button to raise his bed up and asked, “Sir?”

“Relax, Captain,” Fury said, clasping his hands in his lap and leaning back in his chair. He looked tired. “Sorry if I disturbed your rest. I needed a bit of free space to think.”

Steve blinked at him. He was pretty sure Fury had an office on the Helicarrier, didn’t he? Steve had been in there twice – both times had been Tony’s fault, of course.

Possibly reading Steve’s thoughts on his face – or maybe Steve had just said it out loud; the painkillers were making him a bit loopy – Fury drawled, “I do have an office. Unfortunately, everyone else knows where it is, including the Council.”

“Oh.” Steve plucked at the blanket, fighting the urge to pick at the IV line where it ran into the back of his left hand. The tape had started to itch. “How’s the investigation going?”

Fury scowled. “It isn’t. There isn’t any trace of a leak on our end. Given the person involved, it’s likely that we won’t find any, because he wouldn’t need one. But his brother says he’s been locked up tight, and that he personally went over his cell with a fine comb – there’s no sign of a crack that would let him do such a thing.”

“And he’d know?” Not that _Steve_ really had much idea about how much magic Thor knew, but he did know from reading the reports that Jane Foster had reluctantly released – _very_ reluctantly – that Thor had admitted his own knowledge was limited. Aside from it not being one of his interests, apparently the science of Asgard was primarily pursued by women.

“His mother helped, and she was the one to build the cell.” Fury’s voice was _very_ dry. Steve could see his point.

Lying in a bed, feeling loopy from painkillers, it was easy to remember the touch of his mother’s hand on his brow, the way she’d sing to him on nights when the air was far too dry and cold, or dry and hot, as he’d struggle to breathe. He knew, of course, that Queen Frigga might be quite different; Thor had only ever spoken of her formally, according to reports, and the Lord knew that not all mothers were, well, mothers. Certainly some of women in the old apartment complex he’d grown up in hadn’t been, just as some as the men hadn’t been fathers despite having sons – Bucky’s first and foremost.

But in the absence of further information, the tie of a mother to her child was a powerful bond to be considered. Queen Frigga had built the cell for her son, the cell to imprison him for a very long time to come. Any mother might be understood to want to offer her child some slight solace, some tiny crack in the walls.

“Clint didn’t say much.”

“Agent Barton didn’t see much,” Fury said, and Steve wasn’t certain of the honesty in that, even if he was pretty sure that Fury was telling the truth about Loki. But if Fury was keeping secrets from them now, he’d have a reason for it – so what was it? Simply the principle of ‘need to know’? No, Fury never did anything for so shallow a reason as that, even if he often pretended to. Clint had said Asgard was a waste of time – maybe Fury was telling the truth. It was hard to remember, sometimes, that Fury was a very good liar because he often _did_ tell the truth.

Fighting the urge to sigh, Steve sank back against the cushions. It was 3am, and he was exhausted. Pondering the twisting depths of Nick Fury’s mind felt suddenly beyond him, and he closed his eyes even as he wondered if it would be rude to do so.

Evidently not. “Get some more rest,” Fury’s voice said, with that careful edge that he took when speaking to people he thought needed it, which generally was only ever the half of the team that was neither alien nor agency: Steve, Bruce, and Tony.

Well, maybe they all should have been more careful with Tony. Steve’s eyes burned, even with them shut, and he was afraid that if he opened them, if he tried to blink, he’d start weeping in front of the man who was not quite his commanding officer. Instead he hit the switch again to adjust the headrest back down, and turned his face into the pillow, away from Fury.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It took until the afternoon the next day for the doctors to be satisfied with discharging Steve, but after the fifth round of exclamations about his newest x-rays, they grudgingly cut the cast off and let him go, under the condition that he wear a sling and check in with them for another round of tests in six hours. Steve rather suspected it had less to do with any concern for him so much as it did with the chance to study his healing factor. He didn’t actually have any quarters on the Helicarrier, but even if he had, he wasn’t in the mood to go sit in a tiny, cramped room, and the deck was off limit - normally Steve wasn’t bothered by the low O2 at altitude, but one of the nurses had advised against it while he was still healing. Instead, he made his way to the central labs, managing to locate the one that Bruce had set up in on the second try.

“Hey,” Bruce said when he entered, aware of his surroundings in the same way that a war-time soldier was. Bruce didn’t like the Helicarrier – and Steve didn’t blame him. He was somewhat surprised that Bruce had even agreed to come aboard. But then, circumstances were... unusual. “Glad to see you’re okay.”

Bruce sounded pretty distracted, engrossed in whatever it was he was working on, so Steve didn’t try to make conversation. Instead he pulled up a chair – sitting a bit gingerly, as he was still a bit on the sore side without the constant influx of drugs – and picked up a tablet, logging on to the network with his SHIELD ID. The data that he’d been sorting through before Shēnzhèn was all on the Tower’s servers; he tried looking for a backdoor in, but either Tony’s security had proven sufficient to keep them out even without JARVIS - unlikely - or the techs had isolated the Helicarrier in order to avoid the virus that had knocked out the satellites. There was still limited connection to the internet, though – albeit heavily filtered - so, remembering Natasha’s and Clint’s words, he gritted his teeth and pulled up some news sites. They took longer than usual to load; a new antivirus program that Steve hadn’t seen before locked each page and scrubbed it before letting it past.

                                 

_An anonymous source within the DFA claimed yesterday morning the Chinese government has demanded the extradition of Stark Industries CEO and majority shareholder, Virginia Potts, for crimes against humanity. Although Potts released a video statement two days ago concerning the nanovirus outbreak, the billionaire heiress to the Stark Estate has not been seen in public since the day after Tony Stark’s funeral, prompting some to wonder if she’s already fled the country._

_The Department of Foreign Affairs responded to enquiries with the statement that, “It would be unlikely that we would extradite a national without a prior treaty in place.” Calls to Potts’ office yesterday and today went unanswered._

_The Red Cross stated today that it will continue to lobby for access to the quarantined sites. Ri Guo, a spokesperson for the Red Cross Society of China, estimated that approximately 1.6 million people were confined within the quarantine zones. “The people in these zones need adequate food and water. They desperately need access to health care. This is what we know. What we do not know is how much worse it is. Until we are able to go in and assess the situation, we will not able to accurately estimate how much additional aid is needed.”_

_Dr. Ronald Taylor, head of Special Projects at Stark Industries, appeared before a special senate committee today in a closed hearing to testify about the nanobiological outbreak at SI’s Chinese plant. In a statement issued before the hearing, he said, “I was not aware and continue to be unaware of any Stark Industries projects remotely resembling what’s happening in Shenzhen. The Shenzhen plant makes cell phones and nothing else. If there was any other research going on there, it was certainly without my knowledge or approval, the knowledge or approval of Ms. Potts, or that of the board of directors. We will continue to cooperate fully with the Chinese government to try to determine what went wrong, and help in any way we can to bring an end to this situation.”_

_Stark Industries (SI) continued to plummet for a second week, closing down seventy-two points from Monday, at $12.94 per share._

_A survey of international air travel has revealed that flight delays have jumped by 460% over the last week due to the heavy restrictions imposed in the wake of the Nanovirus outbreak in China and widespread telecommunications failures. Despite the Chinese government’s earlier assurance that the Hong Kong International Airport would be open to travellers again by this weekend, it now looks like the quarantine on air traffic from Hong Kong and the surrounding regions will remain indefinitely. Total world-wide air travel remains at less than one-tenth of the usual volume for this time of year._

_The number of arrests in relation to Blackout is rumoured to have doubled, yesterday, after an FBI taskforce conducted raids on residences of several prime members of Anonymous. Anonymous, a decentralized hacker group, disclaimed responsibility for Blackout within hours of the event, but public opinion has shifted against them; a recent poll of our readers revealed that a majority (53%) believed Anonymous members to be behind the global satellite shutdown experienced on Sunday._

_Tony Stark: Genius or Madman?_

_Given this week’s events, it would seem that the clear answer is: Both. While Dr. Taylor continues to plead his innocence and the innocence of his company in front of the senate, and Virginia Potts vanishes off the face of the Earth (a possibility that, six months before, wouldn’t have needed to be considered so literally), the furor surrounding the cover-up of Tony Stark’s suicide has only grown deeper._

_Suddenly, suggestions of assassination seem far likelier, no longer the province of crazed paranoiacs. If Stark was sitting on top of a swarm of killer nanobots, any agency on Earth might have an interest in taking him out of the picture. Further leaked files from within SHIELD paint a picture of an uneasy alliance between the shadowy agency and the high-profile tech company, driven by the need to place some sort of government oversight on the use of the Iron Man weapon, and made fractious by rivalries over technology and control..._

 

Steve hit the table, softly enough so that it didn’t dent, but enough to relieve the tiniest bit of frustration. It didn’t help much, and he had to wave away Bruce’s concern when the scientist looked up, frowning. The damn leak again – and there weren’t enough ten dollar bills in the world to convince him to bet against it being Loki, _again_ , no matter what Thor said about it. Was that why Fury was on the Helicarrier, now? Had the Tower been deemed impossible to secure?

Heels clicked against the decking - not the usual footwear seen on the Helicarrier. Steve looked up in time to see Pepper walk in, impeccably made up in formal business attire. Despite it, there was something subdued about her as she said, “Bruce. Steve. I’m glad to see you’re doing better.” Two suited agents took up positions on either side of the door, their expressions unreadable.

“Pepper,” Steve said in surprise, looking up from the tablet. Bruce just nodded absently and went back to his work – they must have run into each other before now, because although Tony had the habit of completely zoning out, Bruce was usually much more polite, at least greeting them properly before ignoring them.

Steve gestured for her to take the nearby chair, and she did so, crossing one long leg elegantly over the other; the agents remained at the door. “I, uh, wasn’t expecting to see you...” What was she doing on the Helicarrier? He hadn’t thought she had clearance.

“Yes, well,” Pepper gave him a small, humourless smile, and said plainly, “I’m in protective custody. There’re a lot of people who are very angry at SI.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said automatically, although he wasn’t sure if he was - at least not at the part about SI. Pepper, though - she didn’t deserve the vitriol people were spewing in the comments of the news articles that he’d read. From the inscrutable expressions on her escorts, though, it might not be just protective custody. “The company?”

“Oh, Stark Industries is finished.” Pepper shrugged fatalistically. “Every factory we have has been shut down; there’s joint UN-SHIELD-national teams going over them with fine-toothed combs. I’m not sure how many of them will reopen. It’ll take a few years for the company to die entirely - no quick deaths in industry - but it would take a miracle to save it now, and I, um.” She looked at her lap. “I’m all out of miracles,” she admitted. “I’ve been trying to budget how much I can cushion the layoff packages with the estate funds.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said, leaning over and taking one of her hands in his good one. “You don’t deserve this.”

She met his eyes squarely. “When I took control of this company I accepted responsibility for it. There are 320,400 workers in the Park, and a lot of them are already dead. There are over five hundred thousand people quarantined elsewhere due to this disaster, and ten thousand dead, at the last estimate.” She looked away again. “I don’t blame Tony for not telling me. Well, yes, I do. But mostly I blame his hiring practices.” She sniffed. “He was always crap at figuring out who was trustworthy. He shouldn’t have tried to take this on alone.”

“It’s not your - ” he and Bruce spoke simultaneously.

Pepper held up one slim, manicured hand, halting them both. “Yes and no. A terrorist got around Stark Industries’ security and used our technology to kill a lot of people. I should have ensured better security. _That_ is on me.”

Steve couldn’t argue with that kind of logic - that she should have known. He should have known, too. He’d trusted Tony, to not fuck up, to be able to be left alone for _fifteen minutes_ -

“Enough about me, anyway,” Pepper said. “How are you both doing?” She nodded at the sling. “From the gossip mill it sounds like you were very lucky.”

“Strange definition of luck,” Bruce mumbled, ‘hmm’-ing at something on his screen.

“I was,” Steve said, although that sounded terribly wrong, to be lucky to only have a broken arm. But he was. “I heal fast, this is just to reassure the doctors.” It still wouldn’t be completely up to strength for another day - or so the doctors were projecting - but Steve had suffered enough broken bones as a kid to marvel at it, even if he sighed at the doctors’ fascination with his healing factor. During the war he’d never been seriously injured - certainly not to the point of requiring surgery - and while he’d known that minor injuries such as broken or sprained fingers would heal quickly, he hadn’t realized how quickly he could bounce back from something much worse.

“Jim wanted to talk to you, and make sure you were alright, but the Director refused him clearance to the Helicarrier – and then he got recalled.” She tapped her elegant nails against her knee. “I think Fury has something up his sleeve, though, because Jim didn’t pitch a fit over that.”

Steve blinked. He couldn’t imagine Rhodey pitching a fit, but he also couldn’t imagine him backing down after the way he’d confronted both Steve himself and Natasha about being left out of the loop. Unless - a weight settled in his stomach.  Rhodey must have been aware by now about the manoeuvring going on regarding his commission – perhaps he was simply playing nice with Fury because they were both now on the same side.

He tried to get his thoughts in order. If they were both on-side, Rhodey’s transfer might come quicker than Steve had expected. Yet Steve couldn’t bring himself to feel relief over having the team’s roster brought back up to strength, even though he’d had a full week to get used to the idea, even though they’d worked well together in Shēnzhèn. It was stupid - he knew that lost soldiers had to be replaced.

 _“We are_ not _soldiers!”_

Maybe not, but Tony had laid his life down on the line, same as any of them - _more_ than any of the rest of them. He had.

And then he’d changed, somehow, at some point when Steve hadn’t been watching.

“Steve?” Pepper asked gently.

Steve looked up, realizing that he’d gotten lost in his thoughts. “Sorry,” he offered. “Just, ah. Thinking.”

Pepper nodded, and steered the conversation into lighter waters - the marvel that was the Helicarrier, the food in the mess, the graphic art that Clint had drawn on his arm. Bruce apologized for that – “Natasha challenged him to a spar and avenged your honour,” he said, very dryly.

“At least you got it off quick,” Pepper said, and if the humour in her voice was rather forced, they all managed to ignore it.

An hour after she left, saying she was going to lie down in her quarters for a while, a junior agent came to fetch both Steve and Bruce. “You’re wanted on the bridge, sirs.”

“Thanks,” Steve told her, and stood up, thumbing the tablet off and setting it aside, before exchanging a wary glance with Bruce once the agent had turned away. Both of them at once meant news – and none of the recent news had been any good.

By the time they made it to the bridge, Bruce had started to fidget nervously, and Steve found himself tensing in response. The others were already there, except for Thor: Natasha and Clint were looking over something projected onto the table, discussing it with subtle twitches and glances more than with words.

Fury turned away from his screens at Steve’s entrance, coming over to stand with his hands on the back of one of the conference table chairs instead. “Good to see you up, Captain,” he said mildly, and then got down to business. “Flyover energy analysis shows that we’ve got something producing a lot of off-grid power in the Altai Mountains - something that our compromised satellite systems are ignoring.”

“Valley of Spirits,” said Bruce, wandering close enough to peer over Clint’s shoulder. “Poetic.”

“If there are some more of those super-zombies waiting there, then sending in an ordinary strike team is asking for a massacre,” Fury said flatly.

“Sending in the Other Guy might also be asking for a massacre,” Bruce said, taking off his glasses so he could fiddle with them. “We need information, data - ”

“He’s proven he can play nice under need, doc,” Steve said, as Clint sent a copy of the map swirling across the table. He straightened it in front of him, flicking through the photographs that the flyover had taken - good Lord, that must have taken a lot of manpower to mount a search like that, when the entire world was already in a state of emergency. “Trust me, if we run into another one of those people, we _will_ have need. Those guys are _fast_.” Faster than Loki, if not faster than Thor - and they packed a harder wallop, or at least the woman who’d broken his arm had.

Bruce tilted his head in acknowledgement. “I guess you’d know.”

“Thor will be sent along when we next manage to flag him down,” Fury said. “But you’re right, doctor – we need information. Avengers - you’re up.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Your arm going to be okay?” Bruce asked him once they’d all suited up and boarded the jet, Clint taking the pilot’s seat and Natasha claiming co-pilot. This bird didn’t actually have any weapons - it was one of SHIELD’s Stark-designed ultra-stealth jets, with all the non-essentials stripped out to make room for the cloaking technology. Not that even Tony’s best tech could dampen the sonic boom, but by the time it was heard, the jet would already be gone - and good luck to anybody trying to figure out what had made the boom.

Steve extended his arm and rotated the elbow, then the wrist. It didn’t hurt at all, it just felt... weaker than it should have, even though the stiff fabric of the suit provided some reinforcement. Logically, he knew that was still stronger than any normal man’s arm. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.” He could always throw left-handed. And in any case, he fully planned on leaving any super-zombies to the Hulk or Thor, unless there was completely no other option – suit or no, a fully healthy arm hadn’t helped him much back in Shēnzhèn.

They dropped down to subsonic speeds while still twenty miles out - the boom might not be much help in locating the jet, but for a hidden base out in the middle of nowhere, it would provide a hell of a heads up that something was about to happen. Steve hung onto the overhead rail and stared out through the front window as they came in on approach. The facility bore remarkable similarity to Schmidt’s stronghold - embedded into the mountainside - but with a Mongolian flare to the architecture: layered, flared tiled roofs, gleaming pink-purple from the light of the setting sun. There didn’t seem to be any direct way in from the outside - the occasional extremely narrow window, but Steve was pretty sure they were too narrow for him to fit through.

“I’ll drop you two off and park this bird,” Clint said, his voice coming loud and clear over the comm, as Natasha stood up and made her way to the back. “You’re hanging back with me, doc.”

“Ready,” Steve said. They were doing a close drop on this one - the jet’s stealth capabilities were greater than those of a person wearing a parachute.

The bay door lowered, and Natasha sauntered down to the edge and flipped herself over, hanging onto the edge by her fingers for just a moment before she let go. Steve followed more conventionally - he just walked off and dropped, falling for two rapid heartbeats before landing in a crouch. He glanced up, but the jet was almost invisible above them; the only noise of it moving off was a quiet whirring.

They’d landed on one of the outer roofs. Steve crept over the edge and checked it - ten feet below, there were those windows, which upon closer inspection Steve decided Natasha could probably fit through - although there definitely was no way he could. She held up a small, narrow black button - miniaturized explosives, courtesy of SHIELD. He nodded, and knelt by the edge, left hand out.

This time, she took a running start, tucking up into a ball as she jumped, one hand flying back out to grab Steve’s. He swung her in a wide loop, reversing her momentum backward and down, so she was flying straight at the window - let go, and looked over, his stomach twisting at the sight of the drop, but of course she’d caught the window easily. She winked back up at him, her hair gleaming red in the fading sunlight, and vanished into the interior.

Steve crouched, waiting. She’d set the charge, but scout what she could in silence before triggering it - he had to be patient. It was hard, though - he was used to it being the other way around, playing point on sneaking into the evil lairs while his team waited for his signal.

 _“We’re in position,”_ Clint reported; Natasha clicked her radio once in acknowledgement, and Steve murmured a quiet affirmative that wouldn’t be heard over the wind. He squinted upward, but couldn’t see where they’d landed - he couldn’t see any good spots to land at _all_ , actually, which would provide both easy access to the base and good lines of sight to it. The nearest peak wasn’t close enough. Maybe he’d just parked the jet mid-air on auto-pilot.

Natasha’s progress was marked with a constant series of clicks down along the line - SHIELD field-op code. _Left,_ once she’d entered, and _charge set,_ before other directions, mapping her route. Then there was _guard,_ and a long, tense pause, broken only by the muted sounds of something going _thump_ , before she clicked the catch-all _situation resolved_ pattern, followed shortly by, _disguise._

She’d set her mic high enough to pick up sounds from the surrounding area; something creaked - a door? - and then a woman’s voice came over the line. _“Good, set it - wait, you didn’t bring it?”_

“That’s Hansen,” Steve murmured, for Clint and Bruce’s benefit.

 _“Don’t know how he expects me to - ”_ Hansen was muttering, and then she was cut off with a choked gasp as Natasha presumably took her out.

 _“On my way back. Give us a hand out, will you?”_ Natasha’s voice was no louder than the quietest possible whisper.

 _“Roger that,”_ Clint copied.

Silence, other than the occasional indrawn breath from Natasha - and then a sudden rapid-fire tap-code, _danger,_ which Steve almost missed as the window blew. He swung himself over the edge, hovering over the drop for only an instant before throwing himself through the hole in the wall, rolling on the landing and bouncing to his feet, then taking off at a sprint in the directions that Natasha had given earlier.

 _“The prettiest Avenger of all,”_ said a leering voice in accented English, coming in over the comm - “Shapanka,” Steve reported, keeping his voice low even though his footfalls were more than loud enough to attract attention - as if the explosion hadn’t. No point in being sloppy. He rounded a corner and ran smack into the scene: Natasha, dressed in an odd, jumper-like black outfit - it looked like some kid’s idea of a ninja’s costume - was apparently glued to the floor by - was that _ice_ coated around her left foot? She was burdened down carrying an unconscious Hansen over her left shoulder, but the way her free hand was positioned on her hip told Steve that she wasn’t really in trouble - she could draw a gun and shoot Shapanka before he got any closer. More ice was trailed over the floor and walls, glittering in the torchlight – it had taken one hell of a sweep to trap her.

The scientist himself was wearing a blue and white kevlar suit with some sort of machinery as gauntlets, culminating in tubing that wrapped around his wrists and over them, smoking where they ended. Or, no, not smoking... it was wisps of cold.

“Is that supposed to be a reverse repulsor?” Steve asked incredulously.

“My ideas have nothing to do with Stark,” Shapanka snapped. “And if I’d been born in his place, I wouldn’t have wasted it the way he did!” He raised his right arm and fired - Steve dove out of the way, while Natasha finally pulled her gun and returned fire - but not lethally. Instead she just shot Shapanka’s hand. He stared at the mess she’d made of that gauntlet - and tried to lift his arm up to his face to see it, giving an agonized scream as soon as he managed to do so.

Steve threw his shield; it smashed through the other gauntlet and ricocheted back off of the walls toward him. He caught it, and knelt to smash Natasha’s feet free. She winced when the ice - it did seem to just be ice, despite Steve’s thought that it could be some strange chemical - cracked away, and shook out her foot. “Go,” he told her. “I’m right behind you.”

Shapanka was a sobbing, screaming mess on the floor; Steve crossed the room and picked him up easily using his bad hand, his shield gripped in his right. Ignoring the scientist’s cries, he ran back for the exit, only to see a quartet of guards running toward him down the hallway that he’d have to traverse to get there. Another two guards lay slumped on the floor, dead or knocked senseless by Natasha, and there were more still running after her. They all were wearing the same uniform that she’d stolen, equipped with AK-47s and, strangely, _swords_.

Perhaps it was unfair of Steve to judge, when he carried a shield as his main weapon and had a teammate that used a bow and arrow. But as he sent his shield flying and knocked three of them to the ground, it felt fair to be dismissive - Hawkeye’s bow, and his ability to use it, were exceptional, and the serum gave Steve all those advantages without a fraction of the training. These guys, though, just seemed to be common thugs.

Thugs or not, they _could_ shoot centre-of-mass, or at least the one that his shield hadn’t downed could; not that the AK required him to aim much. Steve felt shots impact his abdomen, chest, and upper thigh as he twisted his body to shield Shapanka from the fire, but the suit absorbed by far the worst of the impact. The bruises would be gone within the hour. His shield bounced off of a wall and he caught it as he kept moving forward - the thug backed up, having run out of ammo during his overenthusiastic use of full auto, and drew his sword. Steve knocked it out of his hand with one blow and bashed him over the head; he went down in a heap.

Shouts came from behind him: more guards on the way. Whose base _was_ this? The scientists had been employed by Tony, had been funded by Tony - they didn’t have the resources to staff something like this on their own. Who was pulling their strings now - and how _long_ had they been pulling those strings? Find that, and he’d know who had unleashed extremis upon a million innocents.

He caught up to the guards chasing Natasha easily enough, downing two with a throw of his shield and knocking out another with a fist to the jaw; she dumped Hansen on the floor and took on two of her own, limbs twisting in holds and locks that Steve couldn’t help but admire, no matter their brutal efficiency. She grabbed Hansen again and they took the next two hallways in stride together, reaching the outer wall at last; the quinjet loomed right before the hold Natasha had blown, door open and unobscured by the jet’s cloaking systems. Bruce stood on the ramp looking anxious, but when Steve (gently) tossed Shapanka in, he dragged the scientist over to the side; Natasha, carrying Hansen, jumped next onto the ramp.

There was a noise like a thunderclap, and some invisible force tossed both women to the side - Natasha threw out her arm and grabbed the edge of the ramp, barely catching herself above the drop as Steve’s heart jumped into his throat. Hansen had been almost tossed from her grip, but at the last moment Natasha grabbed the sleeve of her labcoat - the material bunched and Hansen swayed precariously, a dead weight.

Steve leaped forward through the gap, crouching down as much as possible beneath his shield; another thunderclap, and he felt _something_ pushing at him around the edges the shield, but ignored it to crouch by the lip and grab Natasha’s upper arm with enough force that she grimaced - but enough that he had the grip to pull her up in one smooth motion.

In the same instant, the quinjet shuddered, and one of the wings bent beneath another invisible wave of force - it tilted to the side, and Hansen went flying from Natasha’s grip. Steve lunged for her, but missed, nearly falling himself; Hansen dropped, and Steve cursed.

He ducked partway into the bay, grabbing hold of the frame to steady himself as the jet shuddered again, badly listing, and fell away from the fortress. He was beginning to think that his bad luck with planes was a genuine curse. Inside, Natasha and Bruce were struggling to strap Shapanka to something; the bay door ramp started to rise, but locked up with an awful grinding noise halfway through, leaving them exposed. Steve hung on, and through the open door saw a robed human figure swoop down - somebody else who could fly, _great_ \- and catch Hansen. Then the jet tilted again crazily, and he lost sight of them as Clint struggled to pull it into a landing position.

Bruce pulled himself up beside Steve as they continued their crazy descent, and gave him a nod - then jumped. Steve tried to watch him fall, but the motion of the jet made it impossible. Still, he knew when the Hulk had appeared by the mighty roar that echoed off of the surrounding mountains.

The Hulk would be invaluable, but even if he could leap high enough, he couldn’t fly - they needed Thor. They needed _Tony_ \- he was far more agile than Thor in the air, and Steve missed his presence fiercely. Despite his role in the creation of this disaster, whatever that ultimately had been, Tony had fought all-out against the enemies of humanity - and anyone who would release extremis upon a civilian population was definitely that.

The jet tilted up again; Steve could see trees and shrubs beneath them, close to the bay doors - maybe too close. They brushed over top of the vegetation, slowed only slightly by it - slowed more by Clint’s handling of the jet - and hit the ground, hard enough to rattle bones. Steve felt his arm ache, his shoulder strain from holding onto the bay door, but the serum and his uniform worked well enough - when they finally rattled to a halt, he was intact.

The others had fared similarly, with the exception of Shapanka, who was now unconscious within the straps holding him to his seat, either from pain or from hitting his head. Natasha released her own straps and grabbed the first aid kit - it would do them no good to have captured him if he bled out. From the cockpit, Steve could hear Clink speaking into the external comm: “Base, our bird is down. We have a flying hostile, we require air immediate air support - "

Steve climbed out, pulling himself up on top of the jet for a better view. Hulk had landed perhaps a half-mile away, much further upslope, and was roaring at the tiny figure hovering far up in the air. Apparently he was smart enough to realize the difficulty that he’d have in an aerial battle, however, because he wasn’t jumping for the flyer - rather, he was throwing boulders, in huge arcs that ended crashing against the slopes opposite, while pounding his way toward the jet at a run.

The reason for Hulk’s movement became apparent after a moment, as the flyer dropped out of the sky in a controlled fall - no longer carrying Hansen: had he dropped her, or put her down someplace? - heading for the quinjet, and as he got close enough Steve saw that it was Borjigin: he hadn’t recognized him earlier in the robes and with his hair done up in a manner that seemed like it must be tradition of _somewhere._ His entire get-up was absurdly ornate for such a fight, from the heavily embroidered robes, to the many rings he wore on his hands, to the jewelry braided into his hair.

“Hand over Dr. Shapanka, and you may yet walk away from this,” Borigjin called across the rapidly closing distance. “I have no wish to cause further death than is necessary, Captain.”

Necessary. _Necessary_. If he never again heard about ‘necessary’ evil, it would be too soon. “If you don’t want to cause further death, then you’ll surrender yourself and Dr. Hansen into our custody,” he called back, readying his shield. If he could time his throw right, put it when Borjigin was forced to dodge one of Hulk’s rocks... he needed him to be closer to the ground, first, though. Steve wanted him alive. He also wanted to find out how the hell he was _flying_. 

 _“Thor’s ETA is less than five,”_ Clint said over the comm.

Gunfire interrupted their stand-off: Natasha had emerged from the hatch and taken advantage of Borjigin’s distraction to shoot at him. He tumbled mid-air, and Steve threw his shield, angling it so that if Borjigin avoided it, it would arc back to him - but it caught Borjigin in the arm with a barely audible _crack_ , and the man snarled and cursed, dropping close enough to the ground that dust whirled up, making the vortex of air beneath him visible. So that was how he as flying - but how was he making it in the first place?

He raised his other hand, and Steve dove to the side - but not fast enough. A concussive force hit his legs, tossing him off of the quinjet; a moment later, there was another loud crack and the quinjet jolted; Natasha had ducked back to take cover inside. Steve rolled to his feet to see Hulk leap at Borjigin, but he managed to get his arm around in time - and this time, whatever he had projected, it was far more powerful than the earlier blasts. Hulk crashed to the ground, roaring in agony and spraying the valley floor with green blood; his entire face and chest looked like it had been burned off, exposing the raw flesh beneath. Steve stared, stunned for a moment. The world’s most powerful weaponry hadn’t even managed to scratch Hulk’s skin. What the hell was Borjigin?

Clint swung himself out of the open bay door and around behind the quinjet as well, using it as cover, and started launching arrows into the air; Borjigin soared upward, but Clint had predicted that and aimed two above him, set to explode as he passed by. He emerged from the blast with his robes singed and flew still higher, taking aim at them with those same blasts of force that he’d used before.

“Go,” Clint said, not taking his eyes off of Borjigin. He launched more arrows, and Steve sprinted under their cover to retrieve his shield from where it had fallen after striking Borjigin, then sprinted further to take cover behind a tree, trying to get around behind him. Their only advantage was that he wasn’t getting too far away - his force blasts had to have a range limit, and apparently it was one that kept them within _their_ range.

Still. Keeping this up for five minutes, when at any moment he might use that more powerful blast that had downed Hulk... Steve sprinted again as another pair of explosions went off. Clint only had so many arrows - this was going to be tight.

He threw the shield, but apparently Borjigin had grown wise to his vulnerability, and set up a vortex of air surrounding him as well as below him, because the shield was tossed to the side, falling to land a good hundred feet away. Borjigin directed a blast in Steve’s direction, almost as an afterthought - and then the skies began to grow dark.

Thor was here, a full four minutes early. Steve _loved_ that guy, his blindness about his brother be damned.

Borjigin, evidently sensing the change in weather, soared upward and out of range while Steve ran to retrieve his shield. “Enough!” he boomed, his voice inhumanly loud. “You are not the only ones with allies!”

 _“Oh, that sounds good,”_ Natasha muttered.

Thor flew downward, his red cape easily visible even in the rain. Borjigin raised his hand and sheer black light shot out from his ring finger, forming an enormous cloud of darkness; unable to turn in time, Thor flew straight into it, while Borjigin rose higher, and then sent a stream of concussive blasts downward, making the mountains roll back the echoes of thunder. A moment later Thor dropped out of the darkness and slammed into the ground, and Borjigin dropped lower again to continue his assault, until an explosive arrow detonated just outside his wind wall and convinced him to fly upward again.

Trapped on the ground, stuck out of the fight, Steve retrieved his shield and then ran toward Hulk, who was still down - but beginning to get to his feet. The wounds were healing over, lighter green skin already forming around the edges, while darker green muscle grew in over the deepest wounds. Hulk lifted his face to the sky and _roared_ , loud enough that Steve crouched down and clutched his hands over his ears. Still roaring, the Hulk ripped two trees out of the ground and tossed them at Borjigin, then followed them, leaping with a speed far surpassing that which he had been displaying earlier. Borjigin barely managed to steer upward in time, spreading out another enormous black cloud as the first dissipated. He gained altitude quickly, becoming a mere speck in a matter of moments.

Thor had climbed to his feet; now he raised his hammer to the sky, and the clouds thickened even further. Lightning lanced down, into the figure above - but Borjigin raised his broken arm with a shout to meet it. The sky flashed, once, twice, and then lightning blasted out from Borjigin toward the quinjet, burning a hole straight through the wing and flipping the entire jet onto its back.

A trio of jets shot over them, so fast that Steve barely registered them. The next moment, the sky lit up in a fireball, and Borjigin tumbled earthward. He seemed intact, so he couldn’t have been hit with a missile, but he’d definitely been hit with _something_ ; the sonic boom came the second later, causing Hulk to roar at the long-vanished jets in anger. Borjigin righted himself just before he hit the ground – and when he took off this time it was at distinct angle. He was fleeing – a stupid idea. There was no way he’d outrun the jets –

The citadel exploded in a burst of fire. Steve found himself screaming at the pilots, unable to hear his own voice, deafened by the ongoing explosion - why the hell had they targeted the fortress? They needed that! That was where all the answers were! Something was rising from the ruins, out of the fireball – an _enormous_ something, green and with iridescent scales, coiling up into the air like one of the whale-ships of the Chitauri but with far more grace and elegance.

 _“ - ly shit, holy shit.”_ The noise in his ear resolved into recognizable words. _“That’s a dragon! That's a fucking dragon!”_ Clint sounded very impressed.

Missiles streaked toward the creature and pounded into its side, opening wounds like craters. It roared in agony, louder than even Hulk, and breathed out, a stream of curling blue file hundreds – maybe thousands – of feet long, which washed over one of the two jets that had turned back to make the pass; the plane went tumbling out of control and exploded, the wreckage continuing onward and hurtling over the mountaintops, out of view. Then the dragon roared again as both Hulk and Thor set upon it with fists and hammer, forcing it downward; every tree on the slope beneath the ruined fortress was burned away instantly.

A full squadron of jets screamed over the mountains from the south, splitting in two at the end of the valley and making wide loops back: eight Chengdu J-20s. The Chinese had taken note of what was going on near their border. They didn’t fire, keeping to their wide loop on the furthest edge of the horizon, but apparently the dragon realized that it was outgunned; it breathed fire again, head toward the sky, and thrashed, hard enough even to throw Hulk off, as the stream of fire coalesced into a familiar blue portal above it. The sky on the other side was green; the dragon flashed through it in an instant, and was gone.

 _“You have got to be kidding me,”_ Clint said disbelievingly, his voice hard to hear over the constant roar of jet engines. Then he turned businesslike. _“We’re getting radioed by the Chinese - and I still don’t speak Mandarin.”_

 _“Avengers, your ride is one minute out,”_ said a new voice over the comm - one of the female SHIELD pilots. She must have been in a ghosted bird, coming in slow enough to avoid the boom, because six of the J-20s kept their formation, while the other two split off to play escort to the remaining SHIELD jet - Steve hoped that the pilot would be okay. _“This is going to be a tricky pickup, so please be standing and ready to jump.”_

Tricky, sure - the jets couldn’t capture them, but if they wanted them to stay, it didn’t seem likely they’d avoid opening fire to prevent them from leaving. SHIELD _had_ to keep Shapanka - if Borjigin managed to get away with Hansen, then Shapanka was their only lead left.

He ran back toward the downed quinjet, covering the ground easily despite how pitted it had become with rocks and the craters left by explosions. Thor had picked himself up from where he’d been thrown and was speaking to the Hulk, while Clint and Natasha were pulling Shapanka up onto the roof of the jet. “We are still not your enemies,” Thor said in a loud voice. “They have fled that way. Will you pursue them with me?”

“ _Smash_ ,” Hulk growled, low and rumbling, snarling at Thor - but he turned and jumped, soaring into the air before hitting the ground with great, lumbering strides and taking off again, eating up ground more quickly than should have been possible. Two of the J-20s broke off, to loop around and get in a better position to follow him; Steve held his breath, but they didn’t fire.

Good. Jets weren’t as manoeuvrable as the Iron Man, as Borjigin had been - Hulk had proven his ability to take one on long ago. Hopefully the Chinese had some inkling of that and wouldn’t engage.

“I will pursue this foe,” Thor called up to them. As during the Chitauri invasion, despite the battle he barely looked disheveled, except for his hair. It must have been an Asgardian thing - Loki had taken blows from all of them, but hadn’t looked even slightly injured until Hulk had caught up to him. “I fear his magic is not of your world; that was a makluan, one of an ancient race.”

“We need to debrief you later,” Natasha called back, as Thor began to whirl his hammer. He nodded to her in acknowledgement, and took to the skies; the clouds thickened as he shot toward them, and Steve squinted at the remaining J-20s. What would they do, now that another of their targets was departing?

A whir and a hum, and a flicker in his vision was replaced by the bay door of another ultra-stealthed SHIELD jet. Steve wasted no time, nor did the others. They jumped inside, Clint and Natasha carrying Shapanka between them; a pair of SHIELD agents with medic badges took the scientist from them and laid him out on the floor, pulling out gear immediately. The bay door rose again while the pilot said over the comm, _“Strap yourselves in if you can; this could be bumpy. Our watchers ain’t happy.”_

‘Bumpy’ was a bit of an understatement; they flew out of the valley in a jagged, circuitous line that was the furthest thing from straight Steve had ever seen a plane take. He wouldn’t even have thought it _possible,_ if he hadn’t known how much input Tony had had into the flight systems of the revamped quinjets.

Once past the perimeter that the J-20s were flying, they still remained subsonic. _“We’ve got enough eyes searching for the carrier that we’ll be taking the slow route back for a while,”_ the pilot explained. The pair of medics kept working on Shapanka, setting up an IV and checking the emergency first aid that Natasha had done; Steve watched them, exhausted. His left arm ached with a dull, throbbing pain, and both his ears were still ringing slightly.

He drifted off into a sort of stupor, his senses aware enough of what was going on around him, but his mind no longer really processing anything, until finally the jet went supersonic. One of the medics eventually began checking them over while the other kept attending to Shapanka, but she started with Natasha, first – who was idly rubbing at the ankle that had been encased in ice – and by the time she got around to Steve, even the ringing in his ears was gone. It was still hard to muster the energy to do anything more than slump in his seat; the medic shoved a bottle of something that tasted like a protein shake into his hands and told him to finish it before they got back to the Helicarrier.

He didn’t have much of a chance to; they arrived only a few minutes later. Fury wasn’t waiting out on the flight deck – although a medical team, all wearing O2 masks, were, and they immediately took charge of Shapanka as he was wheeled out of the jet on a stretcher. The medics had donned masks, too, and looked disapprovingly at Steve, Natasha, and Clint when they couldn’t be bothered. Evidently it wasn’t important enough that they were willing to face down a trio of Avengers in a snit, though, because neither of them actually said anything.

It was only a brief walk to get inside, anyway, and there Fury _was_ waiting for them, taking in their dishevelled and blood-stained uniforms – they’d all had a turn carrying Shapanka at some point – with a single glance. But he didn’t give them the option of going to clean up before debriefing, instead turning on his heel and striding off, every line in his posture signalling his full expectation that they would follow. “Thor fried his comm again,” he said flatly as they strode along, heading in the direction of the bridge. “I have one report from a pilot, now in the custody of the Chinese military, about a dragon; another pilot downed by dragonfire; and a third who dropped so quickly we don’t yet know what got him.” So Borjigin had taken down the SHIELD jet that had pursued him. Damn.

The bridge doors swooshed open, and they emerged onto the bridge, where Maria was standing at the command post. She drew herself up sharply as they approached. “Sir.”

“I think it’s safe to say that Borjigin isn’t exactly ordinary,” Clint said wryly, pulling out a chair and easing himself into it. Yeah, he’d strained muscles throwing himself out of the way of one of those blasts, Steve thought, looking at him. Or maybe that was from the crash; Natasha was also moving stiffly in a similar fashion. “But if he’s a mutant, that’s one hell of a mutation.”

“He kept pointing whenever he was about to do something,” Steve chipped in, claiming a seat of his own. It was tempting to allow himself to drift off again, but now that they’d assembled on the bridge, it became more obvious than ever that they had three teammates missing. Maybe the two of them still out there were nigh-invulnerable, but they were still worth worrying about.

“You caught those rings he had?” Clint asked him. “Big, tacky things – and I’d eat my bow if I they’re at all traditional – ”

“Yeah,” Steve nodded. He didn’t know anything about Vietnamese – if Borjigin even was Vietnamese – or Chinese or Mongolian tradition, but the rings certainly _had_ been tacky, in a way – sort of the same way that Thor’s getup, if worn by anybody except Thor, would be incredibly tacky –

“Makluan,” Steve said, meeting Clint and Natasha’s eyes and getting nods from both of them. He looked to Fury. “Thor said the dragon was a makluan – another race of aliens, I guess. If those rings were really some sort of alien weapon, then that’d explain a lot.”

“Have we got eyes back on our two wayward Avengers?” Fury asked Hill, sounding slightly frustrated.

She sounded the same way when she replied. “No, sir. From their last reported trajectory they should be crossing into Russia within the next five minutes, and we’ll have eyes then.” For people used to being able to pinpoint anyone, anywhere, with satellites, being unable to rely upon that network had to be frustrating. Another window popped up on her display, and she grimaced. “Sir, the Council is on the line for you.”

Fury narrowed his eye. “Put ‘em on in the other room.” He looked around the table, and nodded to them all before striding out.

Natasha uncurled from her seated position, stretching subtly, and managing to give the impression of a cat flexing her claws. Definitely not a housecat, though – a puma, maybe. “Is Shapanka cleared by medical yet?” she asked Maria.

The 2IC tapped at another of the displays. “They’re just finishing up. Shouldn’t be long, if you want to go stake out an interrogation room.” She smiled coldly, a look that Natasha returned.

“I think I’ll do that.” She sauntered out of the room.

Steve pulled up a document on the table and started tapping out his report for their latest mission, swapping theories with Clint about Borjigin’s powers. “He’s got to have something else we didn’t see if he took down a jet too quick to get a report back.”

“That blast he used against the Hulk would do it,” Clint suggested.

“Yeah, and why didn’t he use that one again?” Conventional weapons needed ammo, but in Steve’s experience, weapons based on alien technology tended to have no such limitations.

“Power overload?”

“Wonder where they get their power from...”

“...scientists can have that one.”

 _“Shapanka’s out,”_ Natasha reported over the team commline.

Clint stood at the same time as Steve did, then grinned and tilted his head, inviting Steve to follow him. “Always fun to watch Nat make an idiot out of somebody. As long as it’s not you. And even then it’s kinda fun, sometimes,” he finished contemplatively. “Kinda like – ”

“I get the picture,” Steve interrupted him. Underneath his irritation he got what Clint was trying to do, he did, but he wasn’t in the mood to be distracted.

The interrogation rooms were tiny boxes, ten-by-ten-by-ten cube cells brightly lit from the ceiling with one-way mirrors on three sides – although from the inside, they didn’t look like mirrors so much as they looked like plaster. Steve and Clint stood behind one of the mirrors, listening to the interrogation through Natasha’s comm - but it was entirely in Russian, so Clint had to translate for Steve. Although Clint was mostly fluent in Russian, he occasionally stumbled, and Steve thought of JARVIS, briefly, before he could shove the thought away.

 _“You’re not what I expected from reading your CV,”_ Natasha opened, settling into her chair with just a hint of wariness. She’d cleaned up and changed into a fresh suit, then added a jacket over top. It added to the picture she was presenting: trying for casualness, but letting her caution – maybe even fear – show. If Steve had never seen her before, he might have even fallen for it – but the Black Widow was _always_ on guard, and it _never_ meant fear.

Shapanka’s right hand was entirely encased within a cast, but it couldn’t have been too bad a wound, or he wouldn’t have been out of medical so quick. He did look drugged, though: eyes hazed over, listing slightly to one side. That could also have been insouciance; he was slumped in his chair like a recalcitrant child.

He didn’t reply to Natasha’s statement, just eyed her up and down. She leaned back beneath his gaze, and said, _“Then again, I guess you’ve been out of your field for a long time.”_

 _“I kept up,”_ Sharpanka growled at her – or tried to. The drugs, though, kept his voice from settling quite into the register he was aiming for. _“A lot of time to read and think in prison. SHIELD enjoyed my thoughts, eh?”_

Steve closed his eyes. _Damn it, Tony._ Of course Tony would have needed him up-to-date… but he couldn’t help but feel betrayed, looking at the man as he gloated.

Natasha acknowledged the point with a nod, and riposted, _“From the results of your research in China, it doesn’t look like that thinking got you very far.”_

Shapanka slammed his good hand down on the table. _“That was not my fault! I told those idiots it was not ready for deployment. Ha, that it works as well as it does is to my credit!”_

Clint grimaced as the scientist went on, while Natasha began to look slowly, grudgingly impressed. “He’s speaking science now – that’s no more Russian than ‘English’ is English. A tech’ll have to translate the footage.”

Watching Shapanka spill his guts so easily, watching Natasha’s reactions, felt… unsatisfying. In his head, he knew it was the desired outcome. But a part of him wanted Natasha to stand up and smile coldly at Shapanka, to thank him for his help and leave him a look of utter bewilderment on his face, just like she’d done to Loki. That wouldn’t work here – Loki’s plan had been based in power plays, in bold actions, while the current mess was about the fine intricacies of cutting-edge science; alienating Shapanka wouldn’t be to their advantage. But reality didn’t stop him from _wanting_ it, from wanting to see the dismay on Shapanka’s pudgy face, the knowledge that he’d been thoroughly had. It was cruel, and petty, and – Steve felt shame heat his cheeks, and said instead, “She’s good.”

Clint shrugged. “It’s all in the initial approach – reading people, all that shit. Sometimes I wonder if she’s not telepathic.” He sounded fond, and a bit distracted, listening. “Huh. Sounds like Borjigin was the guy calling all the shots,” he said, after Shapanka said his name several times, with unkind-sounding syllables in between. Then he swore. “‘Hidden castles, bolt holes – guards and minions – as bad as Stark,’” he translated, when Steve looked at him questioningly. “‘Yanking us about without telling us where we were going, or how – a paranoid madman.’”

Carefully, with first occasional comments and then a bit more sympathy, Natasha worked him around, weaning him away from the science-babble. _“They didn’t value you enough to take you with them.”_

 _“They don’t value anything. They are idiots,”_ Shapanka said, and he sounded angry – not at Natasha, but at his erstwhile scientists. _“I told them that the matches needed to be closer, that the rejection ratio was not going to solve itself – but they do not care. Hansen has fallen in love with her work – she’s blind to its faults. Borjigin wants to improve the human race and doesn’t care how he does it.”_

 _“Yet you didn’t leave them,”_ she pointed out.

_“And go where? Borjigin is a cult leader! Stark had cut me off, left me with nowhere to go – I had no choice! Better to stay where I at least had some chance to defend myself!”_

_“The ice gauntlets.”_ She smiled. _“It works particularly well against them, doesn’t it?”_

He glared at her, as if suddenly realizing what he’d given away, and something small and ugly within Steve enjoyed it.

“Sir, recommendation: try ice against extremis,” Clint said into his comm., on another channel.

Natasha leaned forward, putting one hand over the table. _“Your research doesn’t have to end here,”_ she said, and Shapanka’s expression went calculating again. _“We’re looking for a way to shut extremis down, or make it less… lethal. Your research lies along those areas. We’d be happy to have you on board – all the funding and equipment you need would be provided.”_

 _“I will not work for a secret master again,”_ he spat.

 _“Funding, equipment, and – ”_ she paused, _“ – publication rights.”_

He stared at her, not answering – but from the greed in his eyes, the _want_ , Steve knew that Natasha had won a deal.

They continued the discussion for a while longer, Shapanka soon launching back into science babble – “Man, he has a hate-on for those two,” Clint commented. “Sounds like he’s ripping their work to shreds.”

“Drenkov break this fast?”

“Yeah, they got Bruce to sit down in front of him and he pretty much started screaming in incoherent rage.”

Shapanka’s eyes were even more glazed over now – pain and fatigue wearing at him after an extremely trying day, no doubt. He was swaying back and forth, just a bit, enough to be hypnotizing; Steve blinked and had to look away. He could use a hot shower himself.

 _“If you need to rest before you can start working,”_ Natasha said, solicitously, but Shapanka stopped her off with an almost drunken gesture.

_“No! I have lost too much time already.”_

_“Very well.”_ Natasha rose, her movements unhurried and almost deferential – slipping back into the first role she had been playing. She exited, leaving her out of Clint and Natasha’s view; Shapanka leaned back in his chair and looked impatient, and also in pain, grimacing as soon as the door closed behind her.

Clint chuckled. “Macho guy.”

Half a minute later, a pair of black-clad guards entered and escorted Shapanka from the room, and Natasha joined them in their observation spot. She looked vaguely unsatisfied with the results of the interrogation. “He won’t be able to fix the problem,” she said with a frown. “The entire team of them working for months couldn’t do it.”

“All it needs is an off-switch,” Clint pointed out.

“An off-switch isn’t good enough,” Steve shook his head. “There’re over a million people infected by that thing.”

“If it can make it go inert in their blood…” Clint shrugged. “It doesn’t have to be an off-switch for _them_. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist.”

Steve sighed. “Has Bruce – ” but the pair of them were already shaking their heads firmly.

“Do _not_ ask him that,” Natasha said. “It’s very far out of his field.”

Oh. He supposed that _was_ unfair, to expect miracles from Bruce – sure, Tony had joked about learning thermonuclear physics overnight, but when Steve had asked him and Bruce about that, they’d both chuckled.

“Actually, already was an expert.” Tony had winked, and tapped the arc reactor. “ _Hill_ isn’t, though.”

“It’s not really – the mechanism is quite different,” Bruce had shrugged, pondering the faint light glowing through Tony’s shirt.

“Well, _yeah,_ but I had to have somewhere to start when I – ” and that had been the last that Steve understood of that conversation.

Hill’s voice echoed through their comms. _“You have excellent timing, as always, Agent Romanoff,”_ she said, the sleek, cold tone of her voice reminding Steve of how she’d smiled at Natasha before. He’d never seen them interact before – maybe for good reason. They made a vaguely terrifying duo. _“Your teammates are on their way back.”_

They got to the bridge in time to see the real-time footage of Thor landing, carrying a semi-conscious Bruce wrapped up in his cape. A medical team rushed out to meet them, armed with oxygen and electric blankets – along with a technician carrying a spare comm for Thor. Sheepishly, Thor pulled the old one out of his left ear and replaced it with the new one. He looked as unscathed as always, at least.

 _“I am sorry,”_ he said quietly into it. _“I have failed. The Mandarin lost us in the mountains.”_

“Is Bruce alright?” Steve asked, flicking a glance Fury’s way. Maybe it wasn’t his place to demand the first answers, but he had a responsibility to his team. But Fury was staring at Hill, in a way that suggested they were having an entire conversation made out of silences; she nodded, and her fingers flew over the display, bringing up a file that Steve couldn’t read from this angle. Steve recognized that look, though: realization. What did SHIELD know about ‘the Mandarin’?

 _“I am not sure,”_ Thor sounded concerned as he trailed after the medical team, who were making haste to bring Bruce inside on a stretcher; Bruce’s eyes were opening and closing, but he didn’t really look all there. _“The transformation left him exhausted, I think.”_

The Mandarin would wait; his team came first. Steve nodded to Fury and left for medical, Natasha and Clint following after a silent eye-conversation of their own. 

 _“What did you mean, the Mandarin?”_ Fury asked over the comm.

_“T’was what the makluan called the scientist, Borjigin, while coming to his aid. I thought it some form of title.”_

_“Hmm._ ” There was a pause, then, and Steve would have been willing to bet that he was having another conversation with Hill – either silently or off comms, it didn’t matter. _“Care to fill us in on the latest alien invaders?”_

Thor’s tone changed, growing more sombre. _“The makluans are a peaceful, benevolent people – but in ages past they have had their share of renegades, exiled from their world for their inclinations toward conquest.”_

“Making it somebody else’s problem,” Steve said dryly.

_“It is not a wise strategy, and it has made them indebted to other worlds in the past, as they are now to Earth; if your grievance is taken before them I have no doubt they would offer recompense. But that, like Asgard’s repayment, will also have to wait upon the Bifrost’s repairs; their world is much further from Earth than Asgard.”_

_“We’ll keep that in mind,”_ Fury said. _“Anything else you can tell us?”_

 _“If this one has been working with this Borjigin, as would seem likely by the rings he now commands, then you should keep a sharp eye, for they are shapeshifters of great skill and may assume any form they please. Although this renegade fled your world, I do not think he will have gone far – if only because their bridging magic is not so advanced as that of Asgard.”_ Thor’s voice in his ear was only a fraction of a second or so behind the voice Steve could hear from around the corner; he entered medical in time to see Thor shake his head. “That, and his pride was sorely wounded, to hurl such imprecations at me as he did.”

“Was that all roaring, or did he have some other... way of talking?” Natasha asked, looking intrigued. “It didn’t sound like words.”

“It would not, to your ears,” Thor agreed. “The makluan speak in many tones at once, all overlaid; each tone, a word; all of them together, a sentence. T’is far different from your own speech, but the Allspeak is universal.”

They clustered outside of medical, watching as a doctor and two nurses fussed over Bruce, until he began to wake up and they got waved in. While Bruce sat huddled under a blanket on a nearby bed, wearing a nasal cannula for O2 and drinking something warm and sugary, Dr. Reese berated Thor, until he promised that the next time he had a passenger for more than a minute, he would either fly at low altitude or bring along O2 for them.

“You’re lucky he doesn’t have brain damage,” Dr. Reese finished off, planting his hands on his hips. Thor, perhaps because Bruce did look rather miserable, bowed his head in contrition and agreed.

“And you,” Reese rounded on Steve then, “are still not cleared to be debarking. I accept that it was an emergency situation, but you need to finish getting cleared.”

“Is that really necessary?” Natasha said neutrally, claiming a warm and sugary drink for herself from one of the nurses, who nodded approvingly and pressed them on Steve and Clint, as well. Which... wasn’t really necessary, but didn’t hurt, either.

Steve put his arm out and rotated each joint, testing the motion and the flex of muscles. “It feels fine,” he shrugged. Really, it did – still a bit weaker than normal, but okay.

“We need x-rays,” Reese said sternly. _We_ being the operative word, Steve thought; he was pretty sure that SHIELD medical wasn’t concerned with his health half so much as they were with their data on the serum.

“I apologize for not signing your cast,” Thor said, rather out of the blue, staring at his drink contemplatively, as if he found it strange. Steve took a sip of his own, and decided that yes, it _was_ rather strange-tasting, like somebody had thrown a bunch of tropical fruits in a blender with a hamburger. Strangely, it didn’t taste terrible. “I had not known it to be a tradition.”

“It’s fine,” Steve said, a bit bemused. “I only had it on for a day. That I was awake, anyway.”

“Your healing factor from major traumatic injury is way beyond expectations,” Bruce mumbled around his straw, before frowning down at it and removing the straw from his mouth. Still a bit out of it, then. “It helps explain why you survived the ice – you didn’t appear to have any injuries when you woke up, and really, you oughtta have done a number on yourself – I mean. Uh.” He fumbled for his glasses, looking even more nervous when he realized he didn’t have any. “Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

Natasha and Clint were tag-teaming Reese with matching frowns, now, and the nurse who’d handed them the drinks chivvied him away. It was, Steve reflected, always the nurses with common sense and compassion... the real nurses, at least. With SHIELD it was sometimes hard to tell.

“S’okay, Doc,” Steve said, doing his level best to keep his voice even. Happily, he succeeded. “I, uh – it was pretty quick.” He was pretty sure it had been, at least, since he didn’t have much memory of it – though as he’d told Leo in the past, sometimes he dreamed about lying there for hours, while the cold crept over him one agonizing inch at a time. But other times, he dreamed about the crash, death rushing up and over him in an instant, and upon waking he could never figure out which was the true version – if either of them were. 

“This world is such a fragile one,” Thor said softly. Bruce was looking between the pair of them, now, his drink abandoned entirely. “And I have failed it too many times already. I still do not know how my brother slipped free his cage, nor what other mischief he might have wrought whilst doing so. Neither may I investigate it further, while I must remain upon Earth to assist with this disaster.”

That, Steve _really_ had no answer for. Loki’s fingerprints were popping up periodically in this investigation – Asgard had screwed up. But still, the possibility lingered that it might _not_ be Loki – that it was the Cube, or even some other alien force entirely.

Or maybe just brilliant, fallible humanity.

Fury appeared then, looking displeased; none of them straightened at his ire, and Steve wondered when he’d stopped caring about the opinions of his sort-of superior officer. It had been a long day. “Sir,” Clint acknowledged him; Natasha just nodded cordially. Steve startled a bit at _them_ ; they’d been doing such good impressions of background art fixtures that he’d half-forgotten they were there.

“The Council is under extreme pressure from China to extradite you,” Fury said, crossing his arms over his chest. “They graciously understand that extraditing you two,” this was at Bruce and Thor, “would bit a bit difficult.”

“And are we being extradited?” Steve asked him, tilting his head to indicate himself, Clint, and Natasha. 

Fury snorted. “Do you want to be?”

“Not really.”

“Well, then. I’d highly recommend you hole up somewhere nice and public on American soil,” Fury told him. “I’d suggest Stark Tower, as Ms. Potts needs to get off my damn ship before she launches a corporate takeover of it, and for appearances’ sake _somebody_ should be keeping an eye on her – for her own safety, as well.”

Well, that explained how Pepper had been keeping busy. Fury’s words also meant that the WSC was willing to throw Pepper to the wolves – not that Steve had any doubts about their lack of moral integrity in the first place. But if Pepper was no longer safe on the Helicarrier...

“That we can do,” Steve agreed. Babysitting was a tedious assignment, but at least it was something he could _do_. Until their missing scientists popped back up on the grid, there was nothing he could do here. 

“Tower’s got a lot of security holes without JARVIS to keep an eye on it,” Clint observed.

“The techs we’ve had there have been working on it,” Fury waved off this concern. “By now it should be up to minimum standards. If you’re so concerned about the situation, Agent Barton, you might try giving them some pointers.”

“Sir yes sir.”

“I want you three back on US soil, and the Avengers back in the public eye before the Council gets any more ideas. You’re on press conference duty until further notice.”

Steve allowed himself to close his eyes, briefly. Oh, Lord. He hated press conferences.

“We get our own bird?” Clint demanded. Steve raised an eyebrow at him. A quinjet could land on the renovated and reinforced balcony of the Tower, just barely, but there wasn’t exactly any place to stick it – the bay wasn’t finished yet (might never be finished, now) and leaving an open bird on top of a skyscraper was just asking for trouble.

Fury snorted, apparently finding the request just as ridiculous as Steve did – Clint’s love of flying things could get a bit stupid at times. “You already crashed one bird in Manhattan, Barton, I’m not giving you another to play with.”

“You’re no fun, sir.”

“I aim to displease. Scram.”

Clint saluted lazily and left. Fury glared at them all, was apparently satisfied that they’d do as he bid, and left as well.

“Alas that I must remain here,” Thor lamented, his voice lowering as he became even more serious. “There is no honour in slaying these foes, changed against their will as they are.” He frowned, a brooding look in his eyes, and a wave of empathy crashed over Steve.

“Maybe we should stay,” he suggested.

 _“No, you shouldn’t,”_ Fury informed him over the comm, apparently having overheard. _“We’ve got weaponry in the works to assist Thor; the Avengers are neither needed nor wanted here.”_

“Do not borrow my troubles, Steve,” Thor shook his head. “Perhaps I will yet discover how to capture them without slaying them. No, you must go, and reassure your citizens before the panic worsens. Dr. Banner,” he turned to Bruce, growing concerned again, “are you fit to walk?”

Dr. Reese returned, evidently summoned by the thought of somebody wanting to remove a patient from his care, and took one look at them and sighed. “You can have him if you take him in a wheelchair, and take the O2 tank. Leave that on,” he told Bruce firmly, when the latter reached up to pull away the nasal cannula. “You of all people ought to have a bit more care for your brain!” Then, apparently realizing just what he’d said and to whom, he backpedaled, “Well, all of you should...”

“Here.” Natasha pushed a wheelchair – evidently summoned from thin air, or perhaps from one of the nurses – around next to the bed.

Bruce rolled his eyes, got up, and sat himself back down in it, but didn’t protest, perhaps because Dr. Reese was still looking nervous. The rest of them closed ranks around the chair, sheltering Dr. Reese from Bruce’s view, and as a group they went up to the top bay where the quinjets were housed.

“Farewell, my friends,” Thor bade them after he had helped settle Bruce in – refusing to take with him the oxygen tank that Bruce had somewhat irritably shoved at him. “Perhaps soon we shall be fortunate enough to be called together again by a nobler cause.”

“So long as I can stay at home, I’m perfectly fine by that,” Pepper murmured. She was strapped in near the front of the plane, and spoke low enough that while Steve could hear her easily, only Thor also caught the words.

“Lady Pepper – ” he began, and then faltered, hesitating. Steve could read his thoughts on his face; they matched his own. It was Tony’s work, used in a way he’d doubtless never intended – but he’d been the one to pull together scientists to create it, and he’d kept it secret. _You do it and you figure out what to do about it after..._ a stupid sentiment, when you didn’t know that there was going to be an after.

Everybody always thought they’d have more time than they did.

Pepper smiled thinly and stepped in to fill the gap Thor had left. “We’d be pleased to see you if you got a chance to drop by. And please let Jane know that the standing offer made to her by Stark Industries remains so long as we are still solvent.”

“I shall do so.” Thor gave them all a small, regal nod, and stepped back; the ramp of the quinjet raised upward, closing on the sight of crew clearing the way for the bay door to open overhead. The jet jolted, slightly, as it was raised, light steaming in through the cockpit window – and then they were off.

 

 

 

 

The Tower felt empty upon their arrival, although there were several floors full of SHIELD agents not too far below, and the entirety of the SI New York headquarters below those. But there was nobody waiting for them to welcome them home, and a lump lodged itself in Steve’s throat when he realized he was expecting JARVIS to greet them. They all dispersed quickly; only Pepper had much in the way of luggage, and hers was all on wheels, easily manageable by herself and the SHIELD agents who followed her. 

The Tower systems still mostly worked, even without JARVIS, and after some difficulty Steve was able to check his email. There were only a few new messages of importance. One was from Leo, asking about a virtual appointment scheduled for tomorrow afternoon; Steve tapped out a reply in the affirmative and sent it off quickly. He felt oddly reluctant to speak to Leo, but knew that if he didn’t, it would raise flags with SHIELD, and the thought of dealing with the potential consequences of that was exhausting. At least Leo wouldn’t mind if Steve ended up spending most of the session sitting in silence, or just sketching.

The second email was even more wearying – it was from Sitwell, a prepared package for tomorrow’s press conference: 11am sharp, _this_ was what he was expected to cover, _these_ were the answers and phrasing SHIELD suggested to questions he might be asked – and Steve was sure they were only suggestions: he’d made himself clear enough to SHIELD on that front – and _these_ were restricted topics. The third list was much longer than the first; that was always so, with SHIELD-prepared press conferences.

There were items on the second two lists that he didn’t recognize: commentary about places that sounded like they were in China, but hadn’t been on the list of attacked sites that he’d gotten when he’d checked the news on the Helicarrier; lawsuits, launched against SI, against provincial Chinese governments, against China, against America, against (for some unfathomable reason) Norway; accusations against governments, SHIELD, and SI of everything under the sun from weapons development to eugenics programs. He pulled up a browser and searched some of them out, reading until he felt faintly nauseous; and then he went down in the gym and tried to run himself into a fugue, the treadmill set almost as high as it could go.

Two hours later, he gave up, came back up from the gym and took a shower. But the empty quiet in his quarters soon drove him out again, up to the communal kitchen. The Tower felt so lonely that for a moment he thought no one else would be there, but instead he walked in upon an argument – Bruce against Fury, who was up on a video screen hovering over the table.

 _“None of that data is cleared to be shared with him,”_ Fury was saying as Steve walked in. Clint and Natasha stood off to the side, watching, both of them in ‘off-duty’ postures: Natasha in balance, as she always was, but leaning against a wall, while Clint slouched beside her.

“You’re the Director, you can clear it.” Bruce took off his glasses and rubbed at them with his shirt-tails – a sure sign that he was trying to distract himself.

Next to Fury was an open file, but all Steve could make out of it was that it was a long list of numbers. He had no idea what they could possibly mean, although he could tell that there was a general overall grouping to it. Other, equally obscure files were spread out on the table.

“What’s going on?” Steve asked Natasha and Clint quietly, nodding at the screen when Fury glanced his way. “Sir.”

“I cracked Tony’s encryption,” Bruce put his glasses back on and picked up a tablet pen, using it to point at the files on the table, “on the files that you pulled out,” he pointed to Steve, “from Shenzhen.”

Steve hadn’t even known they _were_ encrypted. “What’d you find?”

“Coordinates. Test results. This stuff?” Bruce made a circling gesture in the air over the left-hand side of the table, “It’s results data. SHIELD’s been trying to open a portal – any portal, let alone a stable one – for the last half-year. Losing the Cube really set them back. Tony? He did it four and a half months ago.”

 _“Is there any record of how he managed it?”_ Fury asked neutrally, apparently unphased by this latest demonstration of Tony showing up SHIELD.

“Don’t know. I’ll keep looking,” Bruce said. “But that’s not the interesting part – or that’s not what _Tony_ was interested in, anyway. He opened up a couple of stable portals, there’re results for that – and then he keeps going, trying for further out. Further away.” Bruce paused for a moment, considering his words. “He’s got a list of coordinates here – there’s an underlying aim, I know it, but I’m not sure what it is yet. Thor’s the only person who might be able to tell us where those coordinates lead.”

 _“Tony went to considerable difficulty to keep all of this research hidden from our alien friends,”_ Fury replied.

“Right, okay. But – look.” Bruce pointed at the file hovering in mid-air. “This isn’t from Shenzhen – this is from one of the drives that got reconstructed, data that JARVIS was able to restore.” He looked at them all expectantly.

“And it is...” Clint spread his hands, apparently attempting to convey his lack of understanding. Steve sympathized – he had no idea what it was, either. Although, the more he looked at it, the more a sense of a pattern stood out – the file Bruce was pointing at was laid out in the same pattern as the ones on the table.

“Right, well, at first I had no idea because it didn’t make much sense – if it was a signal, it was just all noise. But then I got these open,” he pointed to the table, “And it’s the same. They’re coordinates. But these ones?” he pointed back to the floating file, “This file was created almost six months ago exactly. The same day of the invasion. Timestamp has it being only a few hours after.”

“If he got an idea of where the Chitauri came from...” Natasha suggested, but Bruce shook his head.

“No, no – see, that’s not all of it. These coordinates are in the Generalized Foster Theory – it’s expanded to the full eleven dimensions,” he started to explain, and then obviously realized he was about to lose his audience and backtracked. “Look. It’s like – the previous coordinates we used were all points on a line, we could go back and forth in 1D only. And the new system’s a cube – we don’t just have length, we have height and depth. It’s... more generalized. But Foster only came up with it two months ago, which puts it at a couple months _after_ Tony put these coordinates in,” he pointed to the floating file, “ _And_ after he opened a portal using coordinates of this form,” he pointed to one of the files on the table. “Somehow he got the correct type of coordinates right from the start.” Bruce looked around at them all. “He didn’t do that on his own.”

“The Cube,” Clint said, staring at the floor. “Has to be. The things...” he trailed off, before looking up and speaking directly to Fury. “Sir, we told you our theory on that.” He exchanged a meaningful glance with Steve. Natasha looked like she understood what he meant, too, so maybe Clint had shared it with her, too – but he obviously hadn’t with Bruce, because Bruce looked slightly out of the loop. 

Steve studied the file, glancing back and forth. No further patterns leaped out at him – but Bruce was right. “We need to know where these go,” he said, throwing his weight behind Bruce’s argument. Bruce shot him a quick look of gratitude, before raising his chin and staring back at Fury. Left unsaid was that if Bruce really wanted to talk to Thor, there wasn’t much that SHIELD could do to stop him, short of escalating to all-out hostilities.

Fury sighed. _“I’ll get him on the line.”_

 

 

 

 _“I am no scholar in the ways of magic, but I know the realms as well as any child of Asgard,”_ Thor agreed, once he’d been filled in on the situation. _“Tell me these directions, then.”_

“Easier to send them to you, I think,” Bruce said, pulling up a window to do just that, but Thor held up a hand to forestall him.

_“Unfortunately, it is not. Although the Allspeech encompasses all spoken words, I am unable to decipher your written language.”_

“Really?” asked Bruce, looking surprised. “The input matters that much?”

_“Indeed. The Allspeech only functions for auditory communication, for its evolution was governed by concussive phenomena.”_

Steve blinked. Not that he’d thought Thor was stupid, but that had been significantly more ‘English’ than he’d expected from the guy. Then again, considering who Thor was talking to, maybe that was also a facet of the Allspeech. He could get why SHIELD’s scientists wanted to pick Thor’s brain, certainly.

“Fascinating,” Bruce murmured. “Uh – and not helpful. Each of these is... pretty long. Can you read Norse?”

_“Aye, well enough.”_

“Let me just... run these numbers through a translation program, then...” On the screen, a file began growing, with blocky runes instead of numerals. Bruce hadn’t been exaggerating about the length, Steve noted, with some dismay. This was supposed to be a single set of coordinates? There were way more than just eleven numbers up on the screen.

Well, it _was_ a step above rocket science.

Thor, though, read incredibly quickly, scrolling by as though he were merely skimming the file, for all that he was frowning hard.

“Any of that making sense?” Bruce asked after a few minutes. Thor held up a hand to stay him.

He reached the end and paused for some time more, looking like he was doing some very complicated mental calculations, before he finally nodded. _“Aye. That would open a portal to Vanaheim, homeworld of the Vanir. I visited there often in my youth; our realms have been allies since long before my birth.”_

Bruce noted that down, and sent over another translated file, which Thor considered equally contemplatively – this time for even longer. _“Nithafjoll, if I calculate aright. One of the lesser worlds of the svartalfar.”_

Bruce looked like he would have happily let Thor fill him in on cosmology all day, but Steve interrupted. “Those are worlds he managed to get a portal, to, right? He can’t have been that interested in them if he didn’t follow up. What about the ones he was _trying_ to get to? Or some of those?” He pointed to the file that still hung next to Fury and Thor’s images.

Nodding, Bruce sent one of those over, but Thor, after frowning in thought for several minutes, shook his head. _“I can make nothing of those directions,”_ he admitted. _“They are nonsense – one might as well give directions to climb a mountain by swimming.”_

“Really?” Bruce stared at them. “I haven’t had time to test them yet... I’ll have to...” he trailed off, and Steve stepped in before he could get too lost in thought.

“If those don’t work, then what about the ones he was trying to open portals to?”

As he read this time, Thor’s expression became grave and melancholy. _“Ah.”_

“What is it?” Steve asked, but it came out so flat that it almost wasn’t a question at all.

 _“I do not know the realm to which those directions lead,”_ Thor said, _“but I recognize the distance, for it is much further than the bridge to any place within the Nine Realms. It is not something discussed beyond the royal family of Asgard.”_ His expression was closed off, brooding.

 _“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re on Midgard,”_ Fury countered. _“And one of us figured it out – maybe even all by himself.”_ He glanced to Bruce.

“He was really close to getting that one, I think,” Bruce said, pushing his glasses up on his nose with one finger. “Readings put it as pulling in too much power on the last trial run, but projections put it that he’d be able to get it open within the next month – ”

 _“I see,”_ Thor said, holding up a hand. _“You have the right to know, my friends, although I do not think the knowledge will do you any good. We call them elseworlds – worlds within other copies of the Nine Realms, subtly altered by past events and by drift within time.”_

There was silence, for a moment, as they all absorbed this.

“Alternate realities,” Bruce said faintly, and then, stronger, “Oh my god, alternate realities. The logical extension – Jane was saying that it had to be, in one of the higher dimensions it would start branching – ”

“Branching,” Steve said slowly. He wasn’t quite sure he was on the right track – wasn’t sure he _wanted_ to be on the right track. How likely was it that sci-fi authors would get this right? “You mean like that idea where every time someone makes a choice, there’s another world where the opposite decision was made.”

“That’s a simplification of it – it, uh, actually has to do with quantum states... but it’s a good metaphor, I guess,” Bruce agreed. “In one world, you turn left, in another, right – two possible worlds split from that, and then those split, and so on, so that there’s infinitely many worlds out there, where at least one thing is different.”

 _“Not so,”_ Thor shook his head. _“The sum of possible worlds is enormous indeed, but it is finite.”_

Bruce looked taken aback, like his worldview had been suddenly knocked over, and then, even more abruptly, had a bucket of ice water dumped over its head. “What? But then how - ?” he broke off, mumbling to himself, and opened up a blank document on the table that he started scrawling equations in.

 _“Dr. Banner,”_ Thor interrupted sternly, and then he repeated himself again; Bruce looked up the second time. _“Do not dwell upon this. It will do you no good. We keep this knowledge in trust because it is dangerous; in times past, even some of the greatest sorcerers of our people went mad from searching these far corners of the universe. The vagaries of the elseworlds do not lend themselves to use or function; the insight gained by their study is far outweighed by the costs it presents. Tony would not be the first to give in to the despair conjured by the possibilities of a life lived differently. Gaze far enough, and it is inevitable.”_

Tony’s name put a damper on Bruce’s enthusiasm; he gently laid down the pen on the table, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath before opening them. “Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, ‘it might have been’.” Vonnegut.

 _“Yes,”_ Thor agreed.

“So why’d the Cube show him that?” Steve looked sharply at Thor. He, too, felt the weight of Tony’s name – Tony’s work. A reason for his actions, finally, for the sudden, abrupt left turn in his decisions – but it was an empty reason, just as hollow of meaning as any accident – or, no, even worse than that. A punishment, handed down for scientific arrogance – Tony had looked too far, and the Abyss had looked back.

Steve had never believed much in the idea of karma, and cosmic retribution. Pettiness was for humans; God’s forgiveness was infinite. Thor’s warnings made him feel beaten down, in a way that getting beaten up in back alleys by bullies never had – beaten down in the same way he’d felt when Bucky had died, when he’d woken up seventy years in the future, when he’d found Tony’s corpse.

_“I do not know.”_

Natasha shook her head, pursing her lips in a way that meant she was about to play Devil’s Advocate, even if she didn’t especially believe in what she was saying. “It might not have been the Cube – it could have been Loki. Tony was out of communications for over a minute while he spoke to him.”

“Why would he have showed Tony this?” Bruce asked, pointing at the coordinate sets again.

 _“I do not know that Loki would have had this knowledge, although perhaps he gained it in his time elsewhere,”_ Thor put in. _“In Asgard we do not keep records of the paths to the elseworlds.”_

“But it’s possible. Why would Tony have seen it in the Cube?” Natasha countered. “The original coordinates – you said they’re nonsense.”

 _“They are,”_ Thor affirmed.

“No, wait,” Bruce said, holding up a hand. “How? You said they’re like – trying to swim through a mountain – ”

_“I did not intend it to be taken literally – ”_

“No, but – what if there’s not a mountain? What if these coordinates are from... somewhere else? It doesn’t make any sense to tell somebody to drive east for a thousand miles if you start in New York, but if you started on the other coast – ”

Thor paused for thought. _“They should need to be very far away, indeed, to have a chance to be more than nonsense,”_ he said finally, sounding reluctant. _“I cannot imagine that the whole of the Earth, even in decades hence, would be able to muster the power to bridge there.”_

“Maybe you underestimate Tony, then,” Bruce said.

 _“I do not,”_ Thor said, his eyes compassionate. _“It is not the ingenuity of our fallen friend that is in question. Rather, it is that I doubt this Realm possesses enough energy to be conjured forth, no matter the means.”_

“Oh,” said Bruce, his eyes widening. “ _That_ kind of far.”

_“I do not even know that creating such a bridge would be within Asgard’s capabilities; methinks it would lead beyond even Heimdall’s sight, and that is very far, indeed. The Tesseract, perhaps, might be capable, but its nature is far more ancient.”_

Fury scowled. _“Loki’s presence has been all over this situation from the beginning. If he involved the Tesseract, then anything might be possible. My respect for your mother notwithstanding, you need to let us have our own experts examine his prison.”_

 _“There is no way out of that cell. I swear to it.”_ Thor’s brow was crinkled in frustration.

“Loki doesn’t know how to use the Tesseract. He needed human scientists for that.” Clint’s face was blank and cold. “What about from the other side?”

Everybody turned to look at him; he crooked his mouth into a parody of a smile, and said to Fury, “Doors still open both ways, sir. If not that one,” he tilted his head toward the screen, “then another.”

 _“You’re suggesting interference from one of these elseworlds,”_ Fury said flatly.

Steve felt like somebody had grabbed hold of his insides and squeezed. A door opened from the other side. Tony had – if there was any possibility – if it _hadn’t been him –_

Thor shook his head, and Steve had to stop himself from clenching his hands into fists, the sudden urge to _punch_ him strong even through the distances separating him, even through the more logical portion of his brain pointing out how stupid an idea it was, how _useless_. Tony hadn’t gone suddenly insane two weeks ago – he’d been doing strange things for months, things he’d managed to hide from all of them. _“Perhaps. But it is not likely. The elseworlds may be different, but they are subject to the same limitations as our own.”_

“What about where those other coordinates come from?” Clint asked pointedly.

 _“Physical laws remain the same across the multiverse,”_ Thor said, but he was more doubtful, now.

 _“Do you think there’s any chance that your father might be willing to let us study the Cube?”_ Fury asked him. Thor shook his head in reply, grimacing. _“I let both it and Loki go because we couldn’t hold him. But if Asgard isn’t capable of doing so – ”_

“You’d have better luck trying to get the Alterans to share their tech,” Clint muttered from his spot against the wall as Fury negotiated with Thor. When Steve looked at him blankly, he said, “Crappy sci-fi? No? We gotta educate you on that. But seriously, they didn’t even want to explain how the lights worked.”

Steve let the words roll over him as he tried to ground himself again, to get the nausea to subside. He wanted to go back to the gym, to hit something, violently, and at the same time he felt revulsion at himself for having that urge.

“We shouldn’t have let it go,” Natasha said, very softly – soft enough that the mics wouldn’t pick it up, although Steve’s hearing did.

“And then what?” Steve asked her. “It changes more of us?” His voice came out flat, bitter.

“We don’t know,” Bruce said, dropping his pen on the table and shoving his hands in his pockets, hunching over just like he used to back when Steve first met him, back when Loki had first started causing trouble six months ago. “That’s the point, that’s - we can’t know. He cut us out of everything.” He ran his hands through his hair. “Loki wanted the Cube and he was nuts, Tony looked at it and he went nuts - ”

 _“Plenty of people looked at it without losing their minds, Dr. Banner,”_ Fury broke off to interrupt him, pulling the discussion away from an argument with sheer force of gravitas alone. _“This is good work. Until such time as we - ”_ he halted, obviously listening to something in his earpiece. _“Well. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go keep the rest of the world from tearing itself apart. Thor, you’re up in five.”_

His image winked out. Thor nodded in resignation. _“Farewell. I hope to see you soon in person. Dr. Banner – please, heed my warning.”_ Then his image, too, vanished.

Steve tapped the table and pulled up a few news sites. There was nothing out, yet, but something that called for Thor like that could only be one thing – more people enhanced and driven insane by extremis. He clenched his fist, and tried not to dent the table. Without Tony – without JARVIS – no doubt it would be difficult to get it fixed.

“WeapDev doesn’t figure out those cryoweapons soon, he’ll be fighting a losing battle,” Clint commented. He sounded as angry as Steve felt, but his was a bitter, controlled anger hiding behind an almost flippant tone. “Those those things can cover a lot of ground.”

“They’re people, Clint.”

“They _were_ people,” Clint muttered, and headed for the door. Steve sighed and let him go, feeling very tired. Natasha nodded to him once, and then followed Clint out.

 

 

 

The gym held no solace for him; he was well and truly sick of hitting things for exercise. Steve found himself wandering down to Tony’s floor, instead - because the lab had always been Tony’s space, far more than his personal quarters had been. He keyed in his code and stepped through the door, then spent several futile minutes hunting for a light-switch. This floor had never been designed to function without JARVIS in residence. The only light came from that shining through from the elevator landing.

DUM-E and U still lay in the middle of the room, where Bruce had had them laid out - metal corpses. Children’s corpses. What was the death toll from this fuck up? He knew he couldn’t lay all the blame at Tony’s feet - he’d had security measures, particularly JARVIS, which should have worked, _would_ have worked, if not for the exceptionally extraordinary circumstances that they’d found themselves in. Hansen and Borjigin would never have been able to release the virus, except for that. Except for Tony killing himself, and all his children before him.

Senselessly.

“I thought I’d find answers in China,” Steve said softly, breaking the dead silence of the lab. “I thought I’d find... something... that would let me understand...”

Six months ago. Everything pointed to that as a timeframe: Tony had started to act strangely after the invasion, before Steve had ever really gotten to know him at all. Maybe the Cube had shown him something, maybe Loki had – or maybe he’d seen something on the other side of the portal.

“The footage was lost,” Tony had insisted, when Fury had pressed. “Strangely, frying the armour was not the best way to preserve the data.”

“Your brain get fried as well?” Fury had asked.

“There wasn’t much to see,” he’d shrugged. “It was dark, and I was losing containment on the onboard atmo, okay? I knew there were more of ‘em out there...”

Steve had thought Tony was hedging, then, but he hadn’t been – he’d been flat out lying. That time by the map had proven it – because Tony tore himself up over his own perceived crimes, but he hadn’t created innocent victims from whole cloth; Steve had read his file, he knew what Stark Industries’ weapons had done to the Middle East when placed in the wrong hands. But that time in Bruce’s lab had been the only time Tony had ever been willing to talk about it – the map with the red concentric circles had disappeared shortly thereafter, and whenever Steve had tried to bring it up, Tony had shut him down quickly.

Was that what it had been? Guilt? PTSD? Was that what he had seen? Clint spoke of clarity and truth, but trying to imagine that degree of outside influence...

Steve took a deep, ragged breath. “I wonder what it was I didn’t see. I know... I’ve talked to Leo, y’know. I – mental illness doesn’t just appear from nowhere. There should’ve been signs. But you - you’d be smart enough to hide those, if you wanted to.” He reached out and laid one hand upon DUM-E’s lifeless, ruined arm.

“You shouldn’t have. All those times - all that time we spent together, and we’d - we’d joke, or laugh. And I told you - I told you things I hadn’t told anyone, about Bucky. You told me about Howard, about disappointment - you _cried on my shoulder_ when Pepper left - ” he felt metal begin to bend beneath his fingertips and snatched his hand away before he could do more harm. “I thought you trusted me. I thought I - I thought I could be trusted, and I never _saw - ”_

For all that Tony had a cot down in his workshop, Steve had never actually seen him use it (although he’d kipped out on it a few times himself, when dark thoughts drove him from his own bed in the middle of the night). The one time he’d seen Tony sleeping, he’d fallen asleep at his work bench, and although Steve had felt a bit bad that Tony was undoubtedly going to wake up with a crick in his neck, he’d been too afraid of waking him to move him. Instead, he’d settled into his usual chair and pulled out a sketchbook, studying how to better draw sleeping people. Tony made a terrible model when he was awake – he was always too much in motion.

The drawing had gone fine for a few minutes, and then Tony had awoken with a yelp, sitting bolt upright and searching about wildly. His eyes had alighted on Steve, and he’d breathed out, sounding afraid and hopeful all at once, “Steve?”

“Yeah,” Steve had said, staring back at him, not knowing how to reassure him.

Tony’s shoulders had crumpled inwards, and he’d muttered, “Shit,” scrubbing at his face with shaking hands. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

Carefully, Steve had put down the pencil, and joined him over at his lab bench. And when he’d wrapped an arm around Tony’s shoulders and pulled him into a hug, Tony hadn’t resisted; he’d leaned into it, breathed in deeply, and his shaking had subsided. He’d let himself take comfort from Steve’s presence, that one time, at least – Steve was sure of that, sure that if everything else was affectation, that one time had been real.

But Steve hadn’t been there the time it would have counted the most.

He fell to his knees and pounded his fist into the concrete floor; his skin split and blood ran down his knuckles. “I’m _sorry_ ,” he said, and it came out as a sob. “I’m so damn sorry, you son of a bitch, you fucked everything up - you killed your robots, your _kids_ \- I shouldn’t even miss you, for that, you _bastard_. You went so far over the line – ”

There was no answer. Tony’s lab was as dead as he was, all his most precious creations destroyed by his own hand. All of his work gone, all of himself gone: no explanation for how he’d justified installing suicide chips in other people; no whisper of his reasons for letting murderous, scheming scientists have access to equipment they could use to kill _so many_ people. No excuses for how he’d lied to Steve, to them all, and in the process endangered the entire human race. No answers at all.

Steve knelt on the floor and cried.

 

 

 

 

He wasn’t certain how long he knelt there. Long enough to stop crying, for his tears to dry on his cheeks, leaving them feeling sticky with salt. A deep listlessness suffused him; he might have knelt there for hours, uncaring.

Then light flashed, brilliantly, shockingly, momentarily blinding. Steve leapt to his feet before his vision could clear, instinctively reaching for his shield - when his hands ended up empty, he grabbed the nearest object, instead - one of the pieces of U. He almost dropped it when he realized what he was holding; using that as a weapon felt sacrilegious.

Smoke; there had been working electronics in the room - small cameras installed, no doubt, by SHIELD - and now the smell of burning metal hit him again, throwing his memory back in time to that awful day. But as his vision cleared, there was no body on the floor, missing a head - but the man who had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the lab was certainly, almost definitely, Tony Stark.

Steve gaped at him, rendered both speechless and immobile. It was Tony. It had to be Tony - there was no mistaking those features, the angle of his jaw-line – for all that he didn’t have a beard, only a mustache – the look of concentration on his face. But at the same time, the man standing before him was at least ten years younger than Tony, and was wearing an outfit consisting of leather boots, blue silk pyjamas, and a cape that would not have looked out of place on Thor. Half a metal faceplate covered the left side of his face, and he was holding a small device in his hands, blue and white energy stretched around it.

"Excellent," the man murmured, peering at the device. He glanced up just long enough to see Steve gaping at him, and said casually, "Oh, hello, Steve."

Steve felt frozen, paralyzed. Tony was dead. Tony was - he was dead, Steve had seen him dead, on the floor, had seen his body. There was - he'd hoped, as soon as Thor had mentioned the elseworlds, but this wasn't Tony, even if it was - this -

The device that the man was holding gave a small beep; he exclaimed triumphantly at it, as light flowed out from his hands and around it. "Aha! My modulated detector has amplified the signals that the Eye can see; I am close on the trail - almost at the source!" His voice deepened as he dropped into a chant; the blue light intensified, brightening into white that almost covered him. _"Powers of Vishanti, grant me to find, across worlds and dimensions - "_

The light had brought him here - he was leaving the same way. Steve lunged forward, clamping his hand around the other man's arm, just as he finished, _" - this spell that so binds!"_

The light flared again, and the workshop vanished around them.

 

 

 

When SHIELD agents burst from the stairwell a moment later, there was no sign of an intruder.

In fact, there was no one in the workshop at all.  


	4. End Notes

 

...The End! As stated in the front notes, this chapter is merely the end notes, as they exceed the character limit allowed in the actual end notes. My apologies for rambling on so much.

Constructive criticism is welcomed. If you'd like to contact me privately, you can shoot me a [tumblr ask](http://teykekeyte.tumblr.com/ask) or drop me a note on [this LJ post](http://teyke.livejournal.com/312.html), where anonymous commenting is on and all comments are screened from public view.

Thanks for reading!

 

**Minor Marvel comics’ characters (spoilers for this story are within):**

Please note, some of these are more ‘based upon’ rather than ‘import of’.

Leonard Samson, aka [Doc Samson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_Samson), is a psychiatrist tied mainly into the Hulk’s storyline (but who, like basically everybody in the Marvel universe, eventually branched out and had interactions with other people, too). He first debuted in 1971.

Chen Lu is the Iron Man villain [Radioactive Man](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_Man_\(comics\)), who first debuted in 1963 as a communist enemy of Thor. He has since worked for both the Mandarin and Obidiah Stane, who are both very Iron Man-centric villains. He is of no relation to Lu Wei – Lu is just an extremely common Chinese family name. Lu Wei and his assistants are all OCs.

Arthur Parks is the [Living Laser](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Laser), who deputed in 1966, and eventually became Exactly What It Says On the Tin. Ah, comic book science, how I love thee!

[Maya Hansen](http://marvel.com/universe/Hansen,_Maya) is, indeed, the scientist who created the extremis enhancile. She was introduced in 2005, and promptly jailed at the end of her introductory storyline for the exact same crime described in this fic.

Lt. (and Dr.) [Gina Dyson](http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix2/ginadysoncb.htm) was introduced in 1989, when she saved her boyfriend’s life (or... possibly resurrected him) using cybernetics. I wound up cutting her role down to a mere mention in this particular fic, though she'll show up later. And I’m hopeful she’ll get at least a mention in IMIII, as apparently her boyfriend, Coldblood, will be appearing in it.

Alex Nevsky was Anton Vanko’s scientific protégé in the comics and in 1969 he became the third [Crimson Dynamo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Dynamo), a long-running Iron Man foe. He hated the Russian government just as much as he hated Tony Stark, however, and in his backstory here ended up pissing off the wrong people in Russia.

Tem Borjigin is one of the aliases used by the [Mandarin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_\(comics\)) in the comics. Makluans are a race of alien reptiles that sort of accidentally invaded China; the Mandarin’s abilities come from Makluan technology, and he often has one working for him (sort of), Fin Fang Foom. In 616 Makluans resemble giant lizard-people; I used the _Iron Man: Armored Adventures_ version, where they resemble Chinese dragons.

Gregor Shapanka was the first [Blizzard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_\(comics\)), who originally debuted as ‘Jack Frost’ in 1963. Alas for him, he didn’t have much luck under either identity.

[Morgan Stark](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Stark) is Tony’s no-good cousin, who has been around since 1965 and is sort of just incompetently evil. [He does have a bitchin’ pimp cane, though.](http://marvel.wikia.com/Morgan_Stark_\(Earth-616\))

Ralph Roberts is [Cobalt Man](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=5310863), a scientist introduced in 1967 who was studying the effects of nuclear radiation involving... cobolt, surprise surprise. Guess what his (inevitable, eventual) suit of armour was made out of? Presumably it wasn’t [cobolt-60](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt-60) despite the direction of his studies, although given comic-book science, I would not be surprised to discover that yes, yes it was.

[Igor Drenkov](http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/igordren.htm) is one of Bruce Banner’s villains – his first villain, in fact, introduced in 1962. Just before Bruce ran onto the field to tell Rick Jones to get the hell away, since there was a gamma ...experiment... (don’t question the crazy science) about to go off, he told one of his coworkers to shut off the experiment. That coworker was Drenkov, a spy for the Soviet Union, and his decision to not pause the experiment is what caused Bruce to be irradiated and become the Hulk.

The special guest at the very end is [Tony Stark, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth-9810](http://marvel.wikia.com/Anthony_Stark_\(Earth-9810\)). For anyone out there who has not read that story, it’s _What If?_ Vol. 2 Issue No. 113, and I would highly recommend it if you like Tony, because he’s _still an engineer_ – just now he also has magic! And a dramatic cape! And a tendency to switch from his normal mode of speech into sudden DRAMATIC PROCLAMATIONS! Unlike regular Marvel stories, it’s self-contained within the single issue (well, other than being an AU for Tony Stark and Dr. Strange, but it even opens with a summary of the basic premises of their non-AU characters), so go on, give it a shot – it’s a great read!

 

**Misc. references:**

Tony mumbling ‘nutshell’ is a reference, but I don’t think I should say to what.

Blowing somebody’s head completely off with a repulsor was not my idea; thank the Extremis storyline for that.

Tony’s paraphrase of Oppenheimer is from quotes available [here](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer). He’s sort of mangling up two quotes in his explanation to Steve, which I will quote here, directly from that wiki page: 

> _"When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you've had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”  
>  _ \- Testifying in his defense in his 1954 security hearings (page 81 of the official transcript)
> 
> _"But when you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.”  
>  _ \- Speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, 2 November 1945

Travel times throughout the fic were calculated only roughly, but by and large assumed access to supersonic travel capabilities. Are the quinjets capable of going supersonic in canon? I have no idea, but rather doubt it based on their shape and hover ability. However, I find myself unable to justify logically why SHIELD would _not_ have supersonic passenger jets available to them...

> _They are the quinjets that can do anything_  
>  _They can far surpass the speed of sound_  
>  _They can hover, and turn invisible!_  
>  _Because they’re the quinjets that can do anything!_

Except avoid getting blown up, apparently.

Orsen Scott Card is a bigoted homophobe. This doesn’t arise in the conversation about him because it wasn’t immediately relevant to the point that they were discussing, and adding in something related to it would have turned it into A Very Special Conversation.

[Forbes Fictional 15](http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2012/04/20/2012-forbes-fictional-15/) estimates that Tony Stark, the fifth richest fictional character in the world, is worth somewhere between 9 and 10 billion dollars. This seems unusually low to me, since comics (and movie!) characters tend to have _way more money_ than would ever be possible in the real world (...either that, or the stuff they want to buy costs way less for them compared to Marvel Joe Average), and yet a measly $9B dollars would only _juuuust barely_ put Tony in the top 100 (from the Forbes list of real-life billionaires. Yeah, anyone feeling envious?). So I increased his fortune for this storyline enough to stick him up in the top 10.

I’m no expert in game theory, but I do understand the basics of it. The reporter’s misunderstanding about what ‘multiple solutions’ means is deliberate.

The speed and force of those enhanced by extremis is on comics’ level, which tends to be higher than superheroes display in movies. To compensate, I wrote Thor at something nearer to his power level in comics’ canon.

The rings that the Mandarin uses are mainly those that are customarily on his left hand (Steve breaks his right arm): Black Light, Disintegration Beam (what he used to injure the Hulk; this ring has a recharge time limit. Technically it only works on inanimate objects, but damn it, animate objects are made of molecules too), Vortex Beam (how he flies), Impact Beam (his general weapon), and the Matter Rearranger (which he used to take down one of the SHIELD jets off-screen). He also uses the Lightning ring on his right hand to redirect Thor’s lightning bolt.

 _“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, ‘it might have been’,”_ is a famous quotation from ~~_Of Mice and Men_ , an incredibly depressing novel by John Steinbeck.~~ Edit: Whoops. By amusing happenstance, I recently discovered that this quote is actually from _Cat's Cradle_ by Kurt Vonnegut, which I haven't read. I think anyone who has read _Of Mice and Men_ , however, will understand my mistake. I'm not sure that the Vonnegut line _isn't_ a reference to _Of Mice and Men_ , actually, in addition to the obvious homage to a much earlier quote by John Greenleaf Whittier: _"For of all sad words of tongue or pen / The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'"_ ...would Steve have made the same mistake? Possibly. He was around for Steinbeck, but _Cat's Cradle_ was published in 1963.


End file.
